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I would agree that a large portion of esteem comes from
people's recognition that you have expertise in something
that they cannot do, or at least cannot do well. Most of the
people I went to college with (engineering school) sweated
bullets in every one of their "humanities electives," because
they did poorly in those courses and their grades in them
pulled down their GPAs. Many engineers I have worked
with over the years seemed in awe of the fact that I had
an engineering degree *and* could write, and my most
favored of all working environments to come into is one in
which there have been no writers and the engineers have
been required to do their own documents; the look on
most engineers' faces when they hear that they are being
relieved of that duty is akin to what Androcles probably
saw when he pulled the thorn out of the lion's paw.
As for the rest, I think you are grossly overthinking the gap
in perception of a person with a technical degree vs. one
with a non-technical one. For most tech people, producing
a well-written paragraph and avoiding dangling participles is
no less perplexing than nuclear physics is to a non-techie,
and any experienced engineer can tell you how utterly
useless a new engineering grad is on the job for the first
6-12 months. IMO, technical writer esteem, or the lack
thereof, is more than anything else the result of writers
telegraphing their own feelings of inferiority to engineers,
perhaps after going through the same thought process you
just described; if you don't seem to think that what you do
for a project is equal in value to what the engineers do, then
why is it any surprise that others perceive things the same
way?
Gene Kim-Eng
----- Original Message -----
From: "McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>
We might be talking about the difference between holding people in
esteem [not] for something that you can do, but they can perhaps do
better, versus holding them in esteem for something that they can do,
but you can't do at all.
Without higher education, most people can still read, write and find
information. Without higher education, almost nobody can perform real
science and engineering.
I esteem genuinely and demonstrably accomplished persons of the liberal
arts, but consider the mere possession of a BA to be the bottom of the
post-secondary barrel, and the one most demanding of further study and
specialization to warrant more than casual respect.
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