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Subject:RE: Just a Tech Writer (medium length) From:David Castro <thetechwriter -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 10 May 2002 10:19:27 -0700 (PDT)
> If you weren't involved in the entire project lifecycle and instead spent
> your days rewriting text you didn't understand that was supplied to you by
> others, you'd still probably be called a technical writer; you just wouldn't
> be a good one.
Ooh. You're scaring me. That sounds an awful lot like what I do with a big
portion of my time. The rewriting stuff you don't totally understand part. My
company does middleware for mainframe databases. I get a lot of stuff that is
specific to one of seven mainframe databases/file systems, or to two mainframe
operating systems. There's no way that I could understand what a Datacom SPILLF
file is, *and* what binding an application plan does in DB/2, *and* what an
IDMS punched schema report looks like and does, *and* how to configure an IMS
Logger Exit, *and*...well, the list goes on. Sometimes, it feels like all I'm
doing is "making text pretty." I've worked with writers in the past who did
only that, and didn't *want* to do any more than that. I didn't have much
respect for them as writers.
Fortunately, I'm also working on a new piece of software, and am writing
documentation from scratch. Yes, I get quite a bit of the DBMS-specific and
OS-specific stuff that there's no way I could understand without spending many,
many hours reading system documentation, but I also got to spend time
one-on-one with two of the main developers (at their houses, in Boston and
L.A.!), learning how the product works, and coming up with a structure for the
documentation that will work for our users. I even suggested some features for
the product that could increase performance (connection pooling in Java), and
pointed out a deficiency in the way the configuration XML file was structured.
So...does that mean I'm a *good* technical writer some of the time, and the
rest of the time, I'm only a technical writer? :-)
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