Information Engineers

[James Barrow]

>Gordon McLean wrote:
>>iFaqeer said:
>>
>>As a person who chose to be a tech writer partly because I really do not
>>want to be a code monkey, that kind of thing scare, one could say
>>distress, me--that job descriptions for folks who monkey with content and
>>information must have coding and thinks like "network administration
>>skills" in them.
>
>A lot of technical writers have a background, or degree, in English, and
>I've read a lot of beautifully worded technical manuals in my time,
>unfortunately it took me twice as long to find out what I was looking for
>but hey, look at that lovely prose...

There's a happy medium in there somewhere (Large, XL, take your choice).

I've hired tech writers who wrote end-user manuals that looked like they
were writing a letter to their BFF:  "Step 1: Hi, how are ya doin'? Good.
Now that you've gotten this far, you might want to start thinking about..."

The other extreme is the business analyst that I'm currently working with
who fancies himself a tech writer.  I didn't say too much when he was
writing business requirements and included statements such as:  "The
application must allow the user to communicate between modules. Is this
really a requirement??"

When I told him that it wasn't very professional to include his personal
notations in a published doc, he said that this would cause the reader to
think.  Then I asked him why he felt the need to include to question marks.

Emphasis.

- Jim