Re: Changed topic to skills we need - Warning! I am wordy.

["Anthony Markatos" <tonymar -at- hotmail -dot- com>]

Sharon Burton-Hardin said:

If all you can offer me is that you can write really well, I can buy that 
for about $15 an hour from a lot of people..... If you can offer other 
technical stuff, I can and will pay much higher for that.

Tony Markatos responds:

To the degree that I have done the following, the 'writing' part of 
Technical Writing is fairily easy:

- Analysis - ideally a rigorous end-user task analysis.
- Estimating - an more importantly, renegotiating my estimates as more 
information becomes available.
- Standardized of terminology.

The problem with Technical Writers who also devote a significant amount of 
their energies in learning DTP, pre-production, etc, is that they inevitably 
decrease there efforts in doing the above mentioned stuff.  Usability 
suffers greatly!

Many Technical Writers actually appear to be trying to hide from having to 
tough analysis/estimating work by  "jumping into an ocean of technology".  I 
see this same phenomena occurring among the product developers - the "race" 
is on to see how can have the thickest C++ manual on their bookshelf - or 
the most "tool" books.  Meanwhile, there isn't a decent flow-chart in-house 
and no serious attempt is made at estimating (Project Management).


Tony Markatos
(tonymar -at- hotmail -dot- com)




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