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Subject:RE: Definition of Engineer (was: What to do?) From:"David Locke" <dlocke -at- texas -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 29 Oct 2003 19:13:29 -0600
Sorry Chuck, but very few technical writers are engineers to make the claim
that all of them should be might make sense to you, but it is totally
disrespectful of the work we do. The claim has just as much technical hubris
in it as the claims I've heard programmers making when they think I have to
know how to do their job to do mine.
It's fine for you to say we should consider TW to be engineering, but design
is a cross-disciplinary practice. If we let our selves slip into thinking
about writing as engineering and then start using the title, we will end up
with a very small discipline, because ALL of us would be expected to have
attended engineering school to get our shot at the engineer licensing exam.
The State of Texas now license software engineers. And, if they come from
computer science they are grandfathered in, in terms of being able to take
the test, but the questions on the test require an engineering education,
and not a software engineering education. So the computer science people are
going to end up not getting licensed. They can look to their professional
associations for not protecting their interests just like we can look to STC
and say the same thing.
So what would happen if we started calling ourselves engineers, which I for
am not and never could be, most of us would be out of work. That would do
very little to protect the jobs from going overseas or reduce the cost of
technical writing or amplify the value of technical writing.
No dice. Keep your title. And, I will keep my job.
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