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Re: Hi-Tech Company Hasn't Used Tech Writers in Years (Long and V ERY Worth It)
Subject:Re: Hi-Tech Company Hasn't Used Tech Writers in Years (Long and V ERY Worth It) From:"Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Sun, 26 Oct 2003 16:33:05 -0800
"Mike O." <obie1121 -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote in message news:...
>
> What an excellent refutation to the notion that you need subject matter
> expertise to be a technical communicator! These tech writers not only
> lacked expertise, they were fed the wrong data, too!
>
> I suppose the distinction is that the tech pubs group served as editors and
> formatters while the actual "writers" were the engineers and developers. But
> that only strengthens the argument that there is a font fondler role that
> adds value to SME data, in certain situations. Otherwise the engineers would
> have done it all themselves.
Well, my time in that industry preceded the present-day PC-on-every-desk
setup. Most of the drafts I turned in to Tech Pubs were handwritten or
banged out on an electric typewriter, and were then rekeyed into word
processing and edited for grammar and spelling there. Most of the time,
the writer/editors gave my stuff a fairly cursory once-over before passing
it on to word processing, because they didn't find much to change, as
opposed to some of the other engineers who often proved the old saw
that engineers can't write.
> Of course, the whole dynamic sounds a bit dysfunctional to me. I'd be
> surprised if anybody was really happy with it. On some level everybody had
> to realize a team set up like that really isn't performing at the highest
> level - they weren't Being All That They Could Be.
Yeah, it was. Most of it was actually the result of the govt cutting back on
the
number of people we could get cleared. It used to be you could get clearances
for lots of people, then restrict access to info to need-to-know. The docs I
was
working on could usually be broken down to Secret (the majority of the doc)
and Top Secret (the bits I replaced with placeholders); after the great
clearance
massacre, our writer/editors became Confidentials, making it necessary to
subject their projects to the level of fragmentation I described.
Gene Kim-Eng
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