Re: Suggested Tech Comm Curriculum

[Katie Kearns <kkearns -at- cisco -dot- com>]

At 11:54 PM 3/23/2000 -0800, you wrote:
>Okay, some loudmouth challenged me in private email to impart my
semi-brilliant
>vision for a tech comm curriculum. Just to show up the dingle-berry, I
offer up
>the following haphazardly thrown together Technical Communications
Curriculum. 

Well, my first response is that this is no good whatsoever for people who
already have 4 year degrees and just want to transition to the tech writing
field. I already have a molecular biology degree, and I certainly don't
want to sit through basic physics, when I've already had 3 years of physics. 

What I really, desperately, want to know if all of the stuff that you think
is so useless --layout, standard tech writing procedures, or techniques for
increasing readability. 

I already know how to write technically accurate pieces of crud -- I went
to grad school for a year. ;)  I can use so much passive voice, jargon, and
impossibly long, hard to understand sentences that no one would have a clue
what I'm saying.

And I'm 100% sure that I can handle having detailed, accurate text as well
as text that's pleasing to the eye and with a nice layout if someone would
only tell me how. Which fonts work when, how much white space is good, and
so forth.

So just give me a certification that teaches me about tech writing. Not
physics. I already know basic, Pascal, C, C++, FORTRAN, HTML, some
javascript, and even LOGO for goodness sakes. 

And, oddly enough, my tech writing certification program is teaching me
just what I want to know. 

(As an aside, in my program we haven't once been told which tool to use or
even really touched the subject. And I think Framemaker is terribly easy to
learn. And all of my teachers are non-academic people who are tech writers
"in real life".)

Sure, there are tech writing programs that are awful -- but every field has
schools with awful programs. Don't go to them.

-Katie