Re: "Surviving the Dying Career of Technical Writing"

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

âOf course an architect wrote about how to build a building - the
technicians were the only ones that knew what they were talking about, so
they were the only ones who could explain it. It wasn't until later that
people arose who specialized in explaining things - the SMEs teach the
explainers, and then the explainers figure out how to make it accessible
and understandable by a wider audience.

The only thing that has really changed are the media that we use for
explaining and distributing content. Originally, there was only word of
mouth. Then there was writing. [James Gleick has a wonderful explication of
this transition and the effect it had on humans and humanity in his
outstanding book "The Information
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Information:_A_History,_a_Theory,_a_Flood>".
Highly recommended reading!] Writing persisted as the primary medium for a
long time, and is only now being superseded by more visual and audible
videos and their kin.

This transition is so new we aren't yet sure of or really aware of the
changes it is making in us and out abilities to learn and retain its
content. But we -- and our skills in learning and then organizing for
explication and then producing actual content -- will still have jobs in
the future ... they just won't be the same jobs we have today. We will use
different tools and techniques, but the goal will remain the same: get
information from the few people who created it, then structure and organize
that information and present it in a way that is crafted for specific
audiences using the best media at our disposal.

 âMy 2Â,

JG

On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 1:51 PM, Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com>
wrote:

> The technical writing was done by the architects.
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