Lone wRiter at Company

["Karen E. Black" <kblack_text -at- hotmail -dot- com>]

Solo technical writers have peculiar benefits and challenges that team 
members don't. Having spent most of my 12-year career as a solo writer, or 
with one other more-or-less simpatico person, and only about 14 months as 
part of a team of 4 or more with a documentation manager or team leader, 
I've had lots of opportunities, especially when job-hunting, to examine the 
benefits and drawbacks to being part of a documentation department to being 
The Documentation Department.

Solo Benefit: You get to do it all.
Solo Drawback: You have to do it all.

Benefit: People come to you with grammar questions, and you get to show off, 
and mostly they don't know if you're wrong, and you get to set company 
standards.
Drawback: You find out you were wrong while browsing techwr-l.

Benefits: You get a wide variety of tasks and assignments, if you like that 
kind of thing, and I learned I really do.
Drawback: If you sometimes need to bounce a few ideas off someone, there's 
no one at your back to do it with. I miss that.

Drawback: I report to a very busy director, so if someone is stalling or 
ignoring me, I can't go to her for support very often. For example, one 
manager has rescheduled a meeting on me at the last minute about 4 times.
Benefit: I report to a very busy director, who gives me kind of general 
ideas about what she wants, and I get to define my own job, deliverables, 
standards and guidelines, and often deadlines. For example, instead of 
writing an FAQ on a bad Web site, I did some research and wrote a usability 
analysis instead. Which Marketing didn't appreciate much, but Sales 
apparently did.

Benefit/Drawback: People are always surprised when they find out the company 
has finally, after 126 years, hired a technical writer, and wonder what I 
can contribute. Right now it is kind of hard to say...but I have hopes!

Karen Black
Alone Deranger
www.dhltd.com
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