Lone wRiter at Company

Subject: Lone wRiter at Company
From: "Karen E. Black" <kblack_text -at- hotmail -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 07 Jun 2001 11:14:57 -0400

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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