Re: How did you get started in tech writing?

[John Garison <john -at- garisons -dot- com>]

I was in college in the late 60s during the height of the Vietnam war. 
My father was an engineer, but I knew that was absolutely not for me as 
I was never good at anything even remotely mathematical. I started as an 
English major and got most of my credits toward that early and ran up 
against the math requirement. As a Liberal Arts major, I was allowed to 
take a philosophy course in logic as an alternative. I loved it. and 
ended up with enough philosophy credits for a second major.

Little did I know it, but parsing out Kant's Epidemiology and such was 
very good training for coming to intellectual grips with software 
systems: they don't exist in corporeal form, they have certain 
behavioral constants, and they're immensely complex. So when I didn't 
get drafted and had to look for work I got to one place where I had a 
choice between a computer software services company and another company 
that made radioactive isotopes for use in medical applications. I took 
the physically safer route.

I guess I was good at it. I worked at DEC in the mid-70s and got a great 
technical education there documenting operating systems, programming 
languages, and systems utilities. I switched to writing for end users 
and got an opportunity to teach documentation development at Harvard's 
extension school and taught as an ad hoc professor for the next 18 
years. I even got the chance to move to new Zealand for a couple of years.

In all this time I've never been unemployed for more than a couple of 
weeks, learned a lot, and and met a bunch of nice people.  And now I 
live in idyllic Vermont, have a beautiful spot in paradise and write for 
a company that makes the electronic maps you probably use in your GPS, 
phone, or online map service.

Tech Doc been very very good to me.

John G


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