Re: Request to take survey

Subject: Re: Request to take survey
From: Chris Morton <salt -dot- morton -at- gmail -dot- com>
To: "techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2016 08:57:23 -0400

I didn't see any choices pertaining to documenting APIs. That's the #1
opportunity I've seen over the past eight years, and have missed out on
three opportunities because I didn't specifically have prior experience in
this arena.

Chris Morton



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On Wed, Aug 10, 2016 at 8:31 AM, Lin Sims <ljsims -dot- ml -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:

> What I'm curious about is what's meant by using skills "in your job". The
> job I'm currently doing, or over the course of my entire career?
>
> On Wed, Aug 10, 2016 at 8:28 AM, <mbaker -at- analecta -dot- com> wrote:
>
> > I'm not sure what you mean by "has come to include". When did it ever not
> > include these things?
> >
> > The field of technical communication is and always has been extremely
> broad
> > and diverse. It is also a field of niches in which you can be a prime
> > candidate for jobs in one niche and completely unqualified for jobs in
> > another. This seems to lead people, both in the field and in academia, to
> > look only at certain niches and to ignore the rest, in an attempt to
> > generalize more easily about what tech comm is, who tech writers are,
> what
> > they do, what tools they use, and how they should be educated.
> >
> > Every so often, this deck gets shuffled and people proclaim that tech
> comm
> > how includes some new activity, new tool, or new qualification. In most
> > cases, all this really means is that they have changed the subset of
> > technical communication niches that they are looking at.
> >
> > The Web has profoundly changed how everyone communicates. This is not
> > particular to tech comm but all of tech comm is affected by it. On the
> > other hand, the kinds of things that people communicate about have
> changed
> > far less. We just keep adding or subtracting them from the club to suit
> the
> > claim we what to make today about what tech comm is. The actually
> technical
> > communicating goes on apace, often performed by people who have never
> heard
> > the phrase "technical communication". (I had been doing it for a year
> and a
> > half before I first heard the term.)
> >
> > Changing the definition of who is in or out of the tech comm club is one
> of
> > the fundamental tactics that people trying to make a case for some claim
> > they want to make about tech comm. You can make tech comm suit your idea
> of
> > what it should be by cherry picking the tech comm niches that support
> your
> > argument. (I'm not any different in this: I cast a broad net to reinforce
> > my
> > idea of what tech comm is.)
> >
> > But what this means is that when you put out a survey that claims to
> take a
> > comprehensive view of tech comm, partisans for every partitioning of the
> > field are going to jump down your neck for defining the field differently
> > from them.
> >
> > There is another consequence to this as well. No survey conducted in this
> > manner has any statistical validity at all. It is play science at best
> (and
> > I hope that you warn your students about this). But this is compounded by
> > the skew produced by the set of niches you choose to include in your
> > definition of tech comm. It will be impossible to draw any conclusions
> from
> > your survey results unless you both document the niches that you included
> > in
> > your study, and show how you controlled your result set to make sure it
> > came
> > from those niches.
> >
> > Mark
> >
> >
> > >The field of tech comm has come to include more than tech
> writing--there's
> > >content development/mgmt, grant/proposal writing, social media writing,
> > medical writing...
> >
> >
> >
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> >
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> >
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> >
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> >
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> >
>
>
>
> --
> Lin Sims
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> You are currently subscribed to TECHWR-L as salt -dot- morton -at- gmail -dot- com -dot-
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>
> Send administrative questions to admin -at- techwr-l -dot- com -dot- Visit
> http://www.techwhirl.com/email-discussion-groups/ for more resources and
> info.
>
> Looking for articles on Technical Communications? Head over to our online
> magazine at http://techwhirl.com
>
> Looking for the archived Techwr-l email discussions? Search our public
> email archives @ http://techwr-l.com/archives
>
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References:
Request to take survey: From: INKtopia Admin

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