Re: Education (Was Re: Techwriting After the Boom)

["Mike O." <obie1121 -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

Robert Plamondon asked:
> So I'll ask the group: What single course proved to be 
> most useful in your technical writing work? 

1. A survey course in W.B. Yeats. Seriously. Yeats started out as a
Victorion poet, with typical affectations and turgid style, but then
became dissatisfied with the lack of precision of that language, and
then forced himself to move to a much more concrete style of writing.
You can see this in his work as the years go by, and watch what he did
to achieve a natural, direct style of writing.

2. Another lit class that required me to write a three-page paper every
week. At first I sweated it, but later I just went to the computer lab
one hour before class and banged it out.

3. Oh, and I took a bunch of typical first-year sciences, chemistry,
biology, physics, etc. And a couple of computer science intros. Which
seems lightweight, but that's how I learned programming concepts that I
use to this day. 

But I had a scientific/technical aptitude before college. I built
myself a telescope while in high school, grinding the eight-inch mirror
myself by reading old reference books written during the 'Thirties.
Looking back this was non-trivial... It took a couple of months to
grind, and I had to test the mirror to be parabolic to within
one-quarter of the wavelength of light (using a Foucault knife-edge
test, which is actually not that hard).

I didn't really think of myself as science-oriented; I just wanted a
telescope. I guess I would have bought one if I had the money, but I
didn't. I financed it by cutting grass in the neighborhood. I got old
lawnmowers out of the garbage and got them running by reading an old
Chilton's manual for Briggs and Stratton engines. 

And as part of my amateur astronomy hobby, I read tons of
semi-technical magazines and books, and got a basic grounding in
cosmology and astrophysics.

In college I worked in a print shop, running Xerox machines the size of
a Toyota. I often worked all night, so when the machines broke I had to
fix them myself. No manuals, just close observation of the
electrical/electronic/optical/mechanical systems. I eventually got
pretty good at it. To this day, just about the only mechanical things I
can fix are lawnmowers, Xerox machines, and computers.

Technical, non-technical, bah. These aren't words that should be
applied to people. 

Mike O.



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