.

[DEBORAH VRABEL 977-1326 <VRABEL#m#_DEBBIE -at- LIMS-A1 -dot- LERC -dot- NASA -dot- GOV>]

          SET TECHWR-L DIGEST

          Jim Williams was asking about tools and skills to make him more
          marketable. I can speak from the perspective of a Cleveland
          technical writer who has worked for a NASA Lewis contractor since
          1987. (Please note that I am not that knowledgeable about the
          needs of commercial technical writing markets.)

          I'd suggest Pagemaker as your Number 1 choice. In this area, it
          seems to be the de facto standard. Framemaker is popular with
          scientists and engineers at Lewis who have Sun or SGI
          workstations. If you want to work in the scientific realm or for
          high tech vendors, I'd suggest learning it as well.

          Word is popular at NASA, but WordPerfect is more popular. I'd
          suggest getting somewhat familiar with WordPerfect because all
          the computing magazines rate it highly (for what that's worth).
          The two are fairly similar.

          Opinion here is diverse about graphics software. CorelDraw is
          definitiely in the top three. Powerpoint is gaining on it. I'd
          guess that if you know CorelDraw, any other package would be easy
          after that.

          VisualBasic is a good basic choice if you want to get into
          graphical user interface design. Again, there are several other
          easier ways to design interfaces and help systems but it's hard
          to say which would be used most. Although my role at NASA has
          moved away from documentation toward more journalistic writing, I
          have used a package called ForeHelp to design a Windows-based
          help system. I'd suggest that if you're interested in writing
          online help, etc. that you focus on learning the design
          principles behind any help system. I've seen a lot of technical
          people master Help software and put out help systems that use all
          the features of the software but are illogical and confusing.

          Your experience to date looks like you started at a good place.
          I'd suggest some more writing-intensive samples for your
          portfolio. If you want a job where your duties would include
          newsletters, marketing materials, etc., show how you can
          interview a subject matter expert and translate his or her
          technical language into simple, elegant English. Show how you can
          "sell" a new technology or program being developed at your
          university.

          If you want a job writing documentation, find an undocumented
          procedure and write clear instructions. Your university is a good
          source of projects. The best writing sample in my first portfolio
          was a user manual I did to help engineering students get started
          using AutoCAD. My professor offered my services free to the
          School of Engineering and they were happy to oblige. Maybe you
          can find a software package used by students that is poorly
          documented and write a "getting started" guide.


          Good luck.