RE: Lurking

["Carey Jennifer (Cry)" <jennifer -dot- carey -at- cdi -dot- cerberus -dot- ch>]

Yvonne,

Congratulations on taking a proactive approach to choosing a new career.  It
would be interesting to understand which qualities of your personality and
background made you a good candidate for this field.

As I suspect you will hear from other members of this list, there is a lot
more to technical writing than fonts and formatting.  But you may find that
some of the concepts behind these topics that made them so interesting
(readibility, information design, etc) underlie much of what we do.

One of the things that I have really loved about this career (which, by the
way, was completely unplanned) is that it seems to be constantly evolving
and there's a lot of room to follow a direction that suits your interests or
if you want change your focus completely. As you learn more you will start
to see that there are "techie" tech writers, there are writers interested in
process, there are big-picture tech writers, there are detail oriented tech
writers, there are those interested in being involved in the actual
development of the product itself, and there are those that like to do a
little bit of everything. This is just to name a few.  You may even find
that there is a little bit of each one of these characters inside of us.

If you search the archives of Techwr-l, you will find numerous debates about
what constitutes the job "technical communicator" and what qualities and
skills are necessary to perform this job well.  The way I would personally
describe it is the assimilation and synthesization of various information
into an output (voice/structure/content/image/whathaveyou) that is
appropriate for the context and audience.  Of course, this simple definition
could be expanded upon in numerous ways.

I would recommend that you start by checking out the Techwr-l website. You
will certainly find some interesting articles there.  

I did a quick search and found this site, which may give you more
information:
http://www.december.com/john/teach/techcomm

The same site provides an overview of Technical Communication in general:
 
http://www.december.com/john/teach/techcomm/summary.html

Good luck,
Jennifer

-----Original Message-----
From: Yvonne Thomson [mailto:ythomso2 -at- pobox -dot- une -dot- edu -dot- au]
Sent: martedì 23 aprile 2002 9.09
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: Lurking



Hi All, 

I have recently subscribed to this list but have been lurking
for a good reason. Recently I have become more discontented
at work (a school teacher) and went to a careers councellor 
to discuss options. 
One of the possibilities that came from a series of tests was 
technical writing. I didn't have a clue what this might involve
(and was more that a bit humoured by the thought that I was
well suited to something I had never heard of!) So I surfed
a little and signed up to this list to find out what it was all about. 
I have been more than a little excited by the discussions about 
fonts and formatting and have begun reading more widely. I think that
I've found what I've been looking for, and look forward to informed 
participation in the near future. 
Yvonne 



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