How to fend off a tech writer

[Logan Jackman <techscrivener -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

I have found the "fend off a tech writer" topic
interesting. As a writer with 10+ years experience, I
have worked in a multitude of situations and with a
multitude of other writers.

This is just a humble opinion, but it seems to me that
if you have been working on a project for a few months
and then are told not to bother the SMEs, you have
failed to interact properly to create a good
deliverable.

A single instance of the above is one thing, but if it
happens more than once, the writer should carefully
examine why it is happening rather than just blame it
on the "us vs. them" syndrome.

Over the years, I have worked with many good,
intelligent, successful writers; I also have
experience with many poor writers: the writers who
only reformat what an SME writes for them, the writers
who produce documents without complete sentences and
without articles (the, a), the writers who cannot
follow system diagrams, the writers who ask SMEs
questions five separate times in one day rather than
collecting questions and asking the SME all five
questions at once. In my experience over the years, it
has been the borderline writers who have had the most
trouble working with SMEs.

As much as I don't want to be a neo-Platonist, I have
to say that if you are told more than once not to
bother SMEs, you should re-examine your information
gathering methods.

Just my 7 cents worth. :-)


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