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Diane Williams writes:
> I don't see the point in having to disect literature (3 course's worth)
> and take a literary research couse (spending my weekends in the library)
> for my MA in English in professional writing and editing;
Personally I must disagree, for two reasons. First, I never viewed the MA
I did in professional
writing as a real tool to making me a fabulous online help factory. I did
my MA because I
am interested in rhetoric, linguistics, semiotics, and, yes, literature for
their own sakes. I
believe anybody who takes an MA in professional writing with an eye to a
job down the
road is wasting their time and money. Do it because you want to, because
you are interested,
because you enjoy school. As a professional tool, my sheepskin is only
good for beating
my employer over the head with at pay review times. And we all know how
soft and floppy a
sheepskin is.
Second, I think that if you are interested in writing per se, and not just
technical writing,
ignoring literature is misguided. Shakespeare, sexual politics aside, was a
master at
efficient writing. Anybody who has read Hamlet cover to cover may disagree
with me, of course.
But take a speech, a scene, a sentence, a phrase, and see how much meaning
he packs
into it. I have a desktop calendar of Shakespeare's Insults, and the man
could tear you
down to the ground three ways with a dozen words. This sort of value may
be found everywhere,
and there's nothing like an honest grounding in literary study to reveal it
to you.
That said, I believer there is still a gap in technical writing education.
There are plenty of
folks who have solid undergraduate degrees in other fields who don't want
to spend
4 more years doing a BA in professional writing, or 2 years studying the
likes of
Barthes and Derrida. My understanding of many college courses (and here I
must
apologize to American techwhirlers - in Canada, the words college and
university are not
synonymous, but refer to institutions with entirely different focuses) is
that they tend
to hit the target low instead of high. A college program which focuses on
certain fundamentals
in composition and rhetoric, plus give hands-on training with things like
project planning,
HTML coding, online help development, printing, etc would be of enormous
use. Those
are the things I was still missing after a BA and an MA in professional
writing. (Actually,
I chose not to do the co-operative element to my two degrees, so I bet I
could have
got a lot of it from there.)
And no, I don't recommend it be a c********** program.
As they say, my two cents.
Pete Kloppenburg - pkloppen -at- certicom -dot- com
Technical Writer
Certicom Corp
Mississauga, Ontario,
Canada http://www.certicom.com
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