Technical writing for finance: one for the Friday files

Thu May 31 10:30:36 MDT 2007

Writers who can understand and then explain technical (and scientific)
things play a HUGE part in technology transfer. How do new products get into
the market? A technical writer (though s/he may not be called that) writes
about it in some venue that prompts others to finance, sell, and purchase
that product.

One of the greatest jobs I ever had was working in the PR dept of a
university, interviewing scientists and researchers to find out what they
were working on, and then writing articles about those projects for the
public. Research gets funding when people understand what it's supposed to
be able to do for them. 

We're really THE career for the 21st century, it's just a very well kept
secret. 
--Beth

-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+beth.agnew=senecac.on.ca at lists.techwr-l.com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+beth.agnew=senecac.on.ca at lists.techwr-l.com] On
Behalf Of Condo, Candis
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2007 3:45 PM
To: Geoff Hart; TECHWR-L; Ned Bedinger
Subject: RE: Technical writing for finance: one for the Friday files

I find this discussion very interesting. You might want to consider an
article I read last evening on the miniscule amount of published research
results compared to the amount of field work in the HUGH field of
archaeology. The author's point was that most archaeologist hate to write
and love the field work. Therefore, much information is being lost because
they do NOT publish. His point is they need to hire writers (he did not say
technical writers but that's what he was talking about) to get this immense
job done and out there for public or at least university consumption.

Sounds like a great break from hi-tech to me.

Candis L Condo

________________________________

From: techwr-l-bounces+ccondo=c-cor.com at lists.techwr-l.com on behalf of
Geoff Hart
Sent: Sat 5/26/2007 6:06 AM
To: TECHWR-L; Ned Bedinger
Subject: Technical writing for finance: one for the Friday files

Ned Bedinger noted: <<Wow, nice save, Dan! It took me a second to 
grasp the importance of  defending our turf against these loosely-
focused insinuations that jargon and complexity are the key to tech 
writing. There's destructive reductionism lurking out there, in all 
of those alternative career paths where writing, even explanatory 
instructional writing, is featured.>>

Hang on a second, guys. I never said anything of the sort. What I did 
say is that there are a great many more professions than computer 
documentation in which it's important to understand jargon and deal 
with complexity, which is a very different thing. Biology and physics 
and chemistry (among other sciences) represent one very large and 
obvious group; economics (science fiction, really) is another; and 
even the language of dance notation (as described by Edward Tufte in 
one of his first two books) is another. The point here is that the 
genre is _technical_: it has certain conventions you must understand 
and requires certain knowledge and skills before you can work 
successfully with the complexity in that genre.

Also note that jargon does not inevitably mean "words chosen so that 
only the illuminati will understand or words chosen to make the 
speaker sound more important than they really are". That's certainly 
one form of jargon; the other kind involves language chosen because 
it communicates efficiently among people working within a genre. We 
speak here on techwr-l of WinHelp vs. WebHelp vs. HTMLHelp not 
because we're trying to exclude anyone (which would be the case if we 
were talking to non-techwhirlers) or sound smarter than we really 
are, but rather because this jargon communicates effectively. Imagine 
if we had to explain the details of what we mean by "help" every time 
we talked about anything related!

<<In an age where everyone seem bent on making a blind stab at 
defining tech writing as a department and a skillset, it seems to me 
very patriotic to repel borders this way.>>

I assume you're being sarcastic, or perhaps just waving the flag 
without really thinking it through? Any definition can be carried to 
extremes, and that's exactly the wrong point to be making. The right 
point to make is that technical communication really is a skillset, 
not exclusively "writing in the computer industry". That's an 
unnecessarily narrow worldview, and while it might be appropriate for 
the specific community that is techwr-l, it's much like the goldfish 
circling his tiny bowl and being amazed at how rich and diverse his 
world is... particularly that cool little castle. <g>

----------------------------------------------------
-- Geoff Hart
ghart at videotron.ca / geoffhart at mac.com
www.geoff-hart.com
--------------------------------------------------
Coming soon:  _Effective onscreen editing_ (http://www.geoff-hart.com/
home/onscreen-book.htm)

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Microsoft Office, team authoring, plus more.
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Now shipping: Help &amp; Manual 4 with RoboHelp(r) import! New editor,
full Unicode support. Create help files, web-based help and PDF in up
to 106 languages with Help &amp; Manual: http://www.helpandmanual.com

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