Re: Engineers as Writers

[Len Olszewski <saslpo -at- UNX -dot- SAS -dot- COM>]

Bradford Morgan writes:

> I'm still trying to collect additional insights into
> what are the current writing practices of engineers--and find
> the point at which the engineer or scientist yields to the
> professional technical writer.


I don't deal with engineers per se; we have software developers here,
and some of them are engineers, most of them are not. Let's call them
all "subject matter experts" (or SME's) for now, and suspend our
disbelief while I shamelessly generalize...

One of things *certain* SME's enjoy doing is trivializing the work of
the technical writer. I wouldn't go as far as calling it arrogance, but
there tends to be a certain hauteur, a loftiness, a disdain which marks
the attitude of those "doing the real work" towards those "writing the
doc". I often get the sense (especially when explaining to an
incredulous SME why 10 pages of internal doc with two verbs is
inadequate as source material for documenting a product with a million
lines of code) that the SME feels he or she would do a MUCH better job
of documenting the product than the writer, but the time of the SME is
far more valuable, and better spent accomplishing "productive work".
With luck, thinks the deadline-bound SME, the writer won't hack up the
product too badly in the book.

This attitude sometimes changes when SME's try to write manuals
themselves, blow all of the deadlines, wind up with an amateurish
text-dense mess, and call a contractor to bail them out. Sometimes, this
attitude never changes.

Regarding the writing practices of engineers (or, in our general case,
of SME's), there is as wide a variation in this as you can imagine. Some
SME's hate it, some do it badly but think what they produce needs no
further work at all, some do it because they must but realize it's
inadequate, some wish they had done it incrementally, some do it
incrementally, some do it quite well, some don't do it at all. The list
continues.

In general, if an SME feels the writer to whom the task of preparing the
documentation falls is an effective professional with adquate subject
matter experience and exceptional writing skills, the SME will
cooperate. SME's tend to get nervous when there is a question of subject
matter competence in the writer, with no compensating, reassuring sense
of communication professionalism. And I don't blame them.

SME's yield to professional technical writers as soon as they can if
they trust the writers, but postpone yielding for as long as they can if
they don't. Some never yield. Some rely (maddeningly) on the preliminary
doc to assess their work, and make design changes to the product (so I'm
told 8-).

I got a little wound up there. Did that answer the question? I sure hope
so.

|Len Olszewski, Technical Writer | "Vultures don't eat sponge cake."  |
|saslpo -at- unx -dot- sas -dot- com|Cary, NC, USA|  - Trinidad proverb                |
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| Opinions this ludicrous are mine. Reasonable opinions will cost you.|