RE: Technical writing for finance: one for the Friday files

["Condo, Candis" <ccondo -at- c-cor -dot- com>]

I find this discussion very interesting. You might want to consider an article I read last evening on the miniscule amount of published research results compared to the amount of field work in the HUGH field of archaeology. The author's point was that most archaeologist hate to write and love the field work. Therefore, much information is being lost because they do NOT publish. His point is they need to hire writers (he did not say technical writers but that's what he was talking about) to get this immense job done and out there for public or at least university consumption.
 
Sounds like a great break from hi-tech to me.
 
Candis L Condo

________________________________

From: techwr-l-bounces+ccondo=c-cor -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com on behalf of Geoff Hart
Sent: Sat 5/26/2007 6:06 AM
To: TECHWR-L; Ned Bedinger
Subject: Technical writing for finance: one for the Friday files



Ned Bedinger noted: <<Wow, nice save, Dan! It took me a second to 
grasp the importance of  defending our turf against these loosely-
focused insinuations that jargon and complexity are the key to tech 
writing. There's destructive reductionism lurking out there, in all 
of those alternative career paths where writing, even explanatory 
instructional writing, is featured.>>

Hang on a second, guys. I never said anything of the sort. What I did 
say is that there are a great many more professions than computer 
documentation in which it's important to understand jargon and deal 
with complexity, which is a very different thing. Biology and physics 
and chemistry (among other sciences) represent one very large and 
obvious group; economics (science fiction, really) is another; and 
even the language of dance notation (as described by Edward Tufte in 
one of his first two books) is another. The point here is that the 
genre is _technical_: it has certain conventions you must understand 
and requires certain knowledge and skills before you can work 
successfully with the complexity in that genre.

Also note that jargon does not inevitably mean "words chosen so that 
only the illuminati will understand or words chosen to make the 
speaker sound more important than they really are". That's certainly 
one form of jargon; the other kind involves language chosen because 
it communicates efficiently among people working within a genre. We 
speak here on techwr-l of WinHelp vs. WebHelp vs. HTMLHelp not 
because we're trying to exclude anyone (which would be the case if we 
were talking to non-techwhirlers) or sound smarter than we really 
are, but rather because this jargon communicates effectively. Imagine 
if we had to explain the details of what we mean by "help" every time 
we talked about anything related!

<<In an age where everyone seem bent on making a blind stab at 
defining tech writing as a department and a skillset, it seems to me 
very patriotic to repel borders this way.>>

I assume you're being sarcastic, or perhaps just waving the flag 
without really thinking it through? Any definition can be carried to 
extremes, and that's exactly the wrong point to be making. The right 
point to make is that technical communication really is a skillset, 
not exclusively "writing in the computer industry". That's an 
unnecessarily narrow worldview, and while it might be appropriate for 
the specific community that is techwr-l, it's much like the goldfish 
circling his tiny bowl and being amazed at how rich and diverse his 
world is... particularly that cool little castle. <g>


----------------------------------------------------
-- Geoff Hart
ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca / geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com
www.geoff-hart.com
--------------------------------------------------
Coming soon:  _Effective onscreen editing_ (http://www.geoff-hart.com/
home/onscreen-book.htm)

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Microsoft Office, team authoring, plus more.
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full Unicode support. Create help files, web-based help and PDF in up
to 106 languages with Help &amp; Manual: http://www.helpandmanual.com

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