FWD: Job Opportunity Anxiety

[SHAUGLAN -at- GPS -dot- COM]

>>My Anxieties: This is not truly a Technical Writing position,
but is definately a Technical Communication position. I'm
excited by the opportunity, but leary of leaving the area with
which I am so comfortable.<<

I can't comment, at least not any better than anyone else, on job comfort
vs. exciting new opportunities. I can, however, comment on having been
involved in a similar situation as an Extra Project while I was in the
techwriting department. I was all but literally buried in the editing of
support documents that it involved. I developed basic writing guidelines
until my fingers bled, I returned the original entries with Polite
Questions and occasionally tried Snippy Questions, but the writing quality
remained essentially the same, fairly bad. (I assure you this wasn't just
issues with semicolons, but issues with basic understandability of the
text.)

Granted, there were a *lot* of entries to edit, since the product's big and
has a lot of customers, so if your project is smaller in scope, that's an
advantage.

If you take this job and are expected to not only make the support-written
documents readable but to "develop and oversee the internet/extranet
environment that allows customers and Support Specialists access to these
documents," you may need to:

A) seriously relax your editing standards for the first several months or
years
B) bring another employee on board with you from the beginning to share the
editing burden
C) ?

Good luck,

Solveig Haugland
shauglan -at- gps -dot- com

 TECHWR-L (Technical Communication) List Information: To send a message
to 2500+ readers, e-mail to TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU -dot-  Send commands
   to LISTSERV -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU (e.g. HELP or SIGNOFF TECHWR-L).
  Search the archives at http://www.documentation.com/  or search and
browse the archives at http://listserv.okstate.edu/archives/techwr-l.html