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Re: Incorporating Pagemaker in a Tech Writing Class?
Subject:Re: Incorporating Pagemaker in a Tech Writing Class? From:Michael Lewis <lewism -at- BRANDLE -dot- COM -dot- AU> Date:Wed, 4 Mar 1998 22:23:47 +1100
Steven J. Owens has some useful points here -- most of all, he points
out the role of technical writing in the broader field of technical
communication. My concern is that, nowadays, you can't effectively
separate the two. Commercial pressures and tool developments, between
them, mean that no technical writer is divorced from the wider questions
of layout, typography, and "visual rhetoric". At even the most basic
level, a technical communicator should -- _must_ -- be able to make
informed choices, or at least recommendations, about page layout, font
choices, and so on. Increasingly, the competent technical communicator
is both writer and designer. That's precisely why, at the University of
Western Sydney, we've included a "Writing and Document Design" subject
in the tech comm stream: textual and other design considerations are
inextricably woven together.
--
Michael Lewis
Brandle Pty Limited, Sydney, Australia
PO Box 1249, Strawberry Hills, NSW 2012
Suite 8, The Watertower, 1 Marian St, Redfern 2016 http://www.brandle.com.au/~lewism
Tel +61-2-9310-2224 ... Fax +61-2-9310-5056
