Re: The Tech in Tech Writer

[John Garison <john -at- garisons -dot- com>]

I dunno ... I guess you have to define "technical" and that gets a 
little dicey.

In my version of reality, I would say I'm sort of technical. I mean, I 
have a degree in English and Philosophy, but on the other hand, I've 
been working in software development organizations for over 30 years, 
and cut my teeth on operating systems, languages, and system utilities. 
I haven't written a line of code since the 70's, and even then, not too 
many.

So - would I pass myself off as technical? Maybe, maybe not.

HOWEVER, I *do* know a whole heck of a lot about learning a new 
application with an eye toward documenting it. As I tell my tech comm 
students, the five skills all good writers have are:

   * Conceptualization (the ability to pick up the big picture very
     quickly)
   * Investigation (the ability to flesh out and expand my big picture
     through any means possible)
   * Assimilation (the ability to "own" the information inside my head)
   * Organization (the ability to figure out the best way to explain it
     to others)
   * Regurgitation (the ability to get the words out and onto 'paper')


I can learn almost any application in a short amount of time. After 
you've seen a few dozen, you start to see the common components even if 
they do very dissimilar things. You either learn how to learn fast, or 
you become ineffectual. I learned. On my current project, I managed to 
learn it enough to turn out a basic but complete help system (first 
draft level of completeness) in just two weeks so that it was able to be 
sent to an early level adopter.

So ... are you technical may not be the right question to ask. Are you 
able to learn something well and quickly enough to ask intelligent 
questions and to give good feedback? Are you able to sort out a myriad 
of incomplete and half-implemented pages and still keep them in some 
sort of order? Are you able to make sense out of chaos? Those may well 
be more important attributes.

The second aspect of all this is that someone who is technical may make 
all sorts of assumptions that may or may not be appropriate. Is the 
audience technical? If so, a "technical" writer can skip a lot of the 
preliminaries and get onto the meat of the issue. If the audience is not 
so technical, then a less-than-technical writer may be a better choice 
for this project as they would possibly be better able to relate 
background information, etc. than someone who takes such knowledge for 
granted.

I think it was John Posada who recently said that a good writer should 
be able to write up to an audience level as well as down to a less 
technical audience. I grant that as ideal, but rarely see it in practice.

Anyway, that's my 2¢,



John Garison





elizabeth j allen wrote: