RE: Writing Corrective Actions for customers?

["Combs, Richard" <richard -dot- combs -at- Polycom -dot- com>]

Michael West wrote:

> I just find this attitude incomprehensible.
> 
> A tech communicator has been asked to perform a 
> straightforward tech communications task, and other tech 
> communicators are crying "foul!"
<snip> 
> 
> I've been a tech writer for 30 years, and I've observed that 
> the "us" and "them" adversarial approach reflected in the 
> quotation above is the biggest thing holding our profession 
> back from the recognition we all seem to crave.

Gene Kim-Eng wrote: 

> I'm not going to address the remainder of your post, since 
> you seemed to think my last comment was sarcasm.  It was not. 
>  I was entirely serious.
> If a writer reporting to me on staff refused an assignment to 
> provide technical writing support to another department 
> because the work "should rightly fall to a different job 
> description," that writer would be starting down the road to 
> not working for me anymore.  A contractor who responded the 
> same way would already have reached that destination.  I 
> encourage people who work for me to express any concern they 
> may have about their assignments, but they still need do them.

Thank you, gentlemen, for some badly-needed good sense. I was
astonished, catching up on this thread, to see responses to the OP
encouraging paranoid suspicion, uncooperativeness, and a
passive-aggressive "that's not my job" attitude. (And for a contractor,
even, not some union lout with job security!) 

I not only wouldn't want someone with an attitude like that working
_for_ me, I wouldn't want them working _alongside_ me. 

Richard


------
Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
------
rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-777-0436
------




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