Re: You're not the only person who can write

[Steven Brown <stevenabrown -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

Amen Goober!

I just resumed a job I was laid off from about two
years ago. Since my departure, documentation has been
created and maintained more or less on-the-fly by
SMEs. In the big picture of things, it's not that bad.
Is the formatting rough? Yes. Are there grammatical
errors? Yes. Could it be improved? Yes. But somehow
they've made it through 24 months of software
developement and customer support without me.

In the three months that I've been back, no one has
complimented me on my fine grammar, on my font
selection, or my proper indentation of second-level
bulleted lists. What they do notice are mistakes and
incomplete information. I've urged them not to focus
on the content, but it seems that's what's important
to them. Damn them!

So what do I do? Just like you said, I'm trying to
focus on process improvement. I see huge
inefficiencies in the way information moves from
product management to development and then out to the
masses. That's my priority. If called before the CEO
to justify my existence, the arguement I'd make is
that I'm the only person in the company who's is
taking a holistic view of product communication. While
others in the company think about it and have an
opinion about it, that's literally all I think about.

In the meantime, my priority is content, content,
content. I'm not using FrameMaker. Single-sourcing has
no place at this time. And my style guide resides in
my head. (I started writing one the last time I was
here, and you can guess how much it was used when I
was laid off.) My job is to make sure that everyone
fully understands the capabilities of our application.
That means digging into the application like a QA wonk
and adding value. I don't need templates or XML to do
that right now.

Steven Brown
Technical Writer


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