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Re: "Too Good" (was: Hi-Tech Company Hasn't Used Tech Writers in Years - Help!)
Subject:Re: "Too Good" (was: Hi-Tech Company Hasn't Used Tech Writers in Years - Help!) From:turnleftatnowhere -at- yahoo -dot- com To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 24 Oct 2003 10:33:43 -0600
Don't bail out too quickly. If it begins to look like the company has
decided to build in a new direction and leave you standing in the dust,
then you would have a worry that you're beeing seen as redundant and that
would be the time to start resume polishing.
You didn't say what your company's normal business is or how you normally
relate to what's done by other members/departments. If you are in the
training business, then I would have to say it sounds like they've decided
to cheapen their product and process, and you may have a longevity
problem. Also, if you normally work in training projects, the following
remarks would not be useful to you.
I think your boss has a point if she's talking about documents for use in
a classroom training situation. I worked for as a course developer and
computer instructor, and in training the documentation is of a completely
different nature. Most technical training courses are designed so the
manuals give the trainees only about 10% to 15% of the knowledge they are
expected to have at the end of the course. The rest of the knowledge they
acquire comes from the instructor's lectures, and from hands-on labs. The
student manuals are mainly memory stimulants. They provide only the most
critical information and some key words and phrases that give clues to
other important information. One of the design principles we followed was
to have LOTS of white space in the manuals, so the students would have
areas where they could take notes. The theory is, their making notes next
to the key phrases in the manual gives them a tighter memory association.
Since the manuals are just "skeleton" documents, there really is less
worry about how they're done, as long as the spelling is correct. If you
are a really high-level tech writer, trying to do such a student manual
would probably feel to you like trying write a child's book.
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