Re: The Writer's Kit

Subject: Re: The Writer's Kit
From: Peter Brown <pbrown -at- MKS -dot- COM>
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 1998 15:28:22 -0500

Andrew Plato wrote:
>
> Would you hire a plumber who only used a snake -- even to fix leaky sinks?
> Would you hire an electrician who insisted on using only 220 volt wiring
> (even for puny 12 volt things).
> Would you hire a auto mechanic who only will work with a metric socket set
> (and you have an American car)?
>
> No, so why would you want tech writers that don't have or know all the
> tools? I mean the big stuff like Word, PageMaker, and FrameMaker. Nobody
> cares if you don't know EsotericMaker version 9.3-B for UNIX or something
> equally obscure. But the big stuff - you should know it, use it, and deal
> with it.
>
> Professionals are not influenced by tool and technology holy wars.

Before that, Jim Chevallier <JIMCHEVAL -at- aol -dot- com> wrote:
> >Recently I got some gentle jibing from a client who insisted that I
> "should"
> >have Pagemaker since I was a technical writer. My own opinion was that
> >Pagemaker was a desktop publishing tool and not a writing tool per se, and
> it
> >certainly wasn't reasonable to just expect that I would have it (I had in
> fact
> >explicitly said I didn't during our first meeting.) Nor that writing
> services
> >would necessarily include printer-ready layout.
> >
> >My question: what do members of this list consider basic components of a
> >freelance TW's kit - i.e., what's a 'must', what's a 'should' and what's a
> >'nice to have'? I'm thinking both hardware and software here. (I've
> checked
> >the archive and we've knocked around lots of closely related ideas, but
> not,
> >so far as I can find, this one in particular.)
> >
> >To put it another way, what should a client expect a freelancer will
> >reasonably have available as a matter of course?
> >
> >Also, how much has desktop publishing implicitly become part of our job
> >description? Word has aspects of DTP, but my Word files have been sent
> >elsewhere for pre-press work. Whereas this most recent client expects it
> all
> >as part of TW work.
> >
> >Comments?
> >
> >Jim Chevallier
> >Los Angeles

To paraphrase Martin Sheen's character in The American President,
clients have a way of deciding for themselves what is and is not
"reasonable to expect" from a contractor. We have two issues here:
1. where does technical writing end and desktop publishing begin?
2. should a technical writer be expected to know a certain core of
software products, and which members should that core have?

In the case of contracting, I'd answer both questions with: whatever the
client wants. Each client is going to have different needs and
expectations, some wanting you to just provide textual content and maybe
a graphic or two, and some wanting you to hand them a finished book.

A client has every right to say: "I'll only give this job to someone who
knows PageMaker," just as it's your right to research the client's needs
and try to convince him or her that you can do the job with another
package.

Whether that is a good decision on the client's part is for the free
market to decide.

--
Peter Brown, Technical Writer (pbrown -at- mks -dot- com)
Mortice Kern Systems Inc., Waterloo, Ontario, Canada




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