Re: Techwriting after the boom
I think you need to ignore Andrew's hyperbole and pet-topics and put aside your own animosity. Focus on what he is saying. So far as I can see, his view is broadly true.The 90s .... saw the rise of the SME (Subject Matter Expert)
as a concept.
O jeez, here we go again.
No doubt you will counter with your own novel
explanation of what you mean by "the rise of" --
but the specialization of the SME role and the editorial
role in the creation of instructional material, procedure
guides, and related matter goes back a hell of a lot farther
than 1990. How far would you care to go? 1890? 1790?
1690?
I was one of the many Arts types who drifted into tech-writing in the early to mid-1990s. Many veterans in the field had technical backgrounds, and those who didn't clearly felt that writers had an obligation to become technical as quickly as possibly. But the impression I received in the class room and from the STC was that the days when you needed technical expertise were gone. And, like many newcomers, I accepted that line eagerly - not surprisingly, since tech-writing beat sessional teaching at the universities and waiting for the tenured faculty to retire so that positions could open up. It was only after a year or so of working in the field that I realized that writing skills were not enough to take me where I wanted to go.
Of course, you can quibble about dates. Changes in a society or even a subculture don't happen cleanly. But, even though you can't pinpoint them exactly, you can still say that, somewhere in a certain time frame, values or opinions shifted.
Writing/editing/publication design/teaching have all beenNot really. If you ignore writers who wrote for a patron, then the professional who makes a living by writing is only about three centuries old.
occupational specialties for centuries.
As a side note, about the closest thing to a technical writer in the 1700s would be the ministers who sold sermons for a living. These writers needed a strong grasp of theology, as well as an ability to write. Aside from a few best sellers, most sermon sellers don't seem to have made a very good living, either.
Why? Because it takesI don't disagree, but I do want to point out that different levels of expertise are needed for different types of writing.
a lifetime to learn to do them well.
As someone who has professionally published technical-writing, journalism and fiction and poetry, I have no hesitation in saying that technical writing requires far less writing expertise than any of the others.
I am in no way denigrating technical writing when I say this (and I'd be stupid to, since it has provided a good chunk of my income for a number of years now, and, often enough, the majority of my income). But I am saying that, in most cases, you could teach the writing skills for someone to function as a technical writer much faster than you could teach the same person to be a journalist, much less to write fiction.
It's also worth emphasizing what should be an obvious point: writing skills of any kind don't exist in isolation. In any type of writing, you need something to write about. In literature, for example, in periods in which art for art's sake has been the general philosophy, poetry and fiction tend to strike a minor key. Technical writing that is not informed by a thorough understanding of the subject is likely to be just as superficial as belle-lettres.
Naturally, you can go to the other extreme, and say that, because a piece of writing is Marxist, feminist, or has any other type of content of which you approve, it must be a skilled piece of work - or that, because a technical writer obviously knows the material, then his or her docs must be good ones. But everybody is well aware of that danger, so we hardly need a warning about it.
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