RE: Re: You're not the only person who can write

["Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>]

It's been my experience over the years, both as an engineer 
who writes and as a fulltime writer, that it's not so much
that engineers can't write as it is that they won't.  Unless
they're highly motivated (for example, by being told that
there's no budget for writers and if they don't take on the
task there won't be a budget for them, either), they'll
either dodge the work altogether or give it so little 
effort that the end result is often the same as if they
can't.  In fact, I suspect that the old "engineers can't
write" myth was originally propagated not by writers trying
to get the work, but by engineers tryting to avoid it.  But
the simple fact is, given time and a strong motivation to
do it, most engineers can manage to grind out documentation
that is both technically accurate and reasonably readable.
The way to enlist engineers' support for the continued
retention of tech writers is not to keep telling them that
you're there because they can't, but rather that you're
there so they won't have to.

Gene Kim-Eng


------- Original Message -------
On
Fri, 23 Jan 2004 06:41:19 -0800 (PST) Steven Brown?wrote:

>Yes. But somehow they've made it through 24 months of 
>software developement and customer support without me.