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Subject:Re: Hey! She messed with *my* manual From:Julie Stickler <jstickler -at- gmail -dot- com> To:TECHWR-L Writing <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:35:08 -0400
You’re not the only one who feels a certain possessiveness about what
you’ve written. But Char makes some good points about DITA and reuse.
We once moved an entire chapter from one of my manuals to a new
manual. The chapter had already been gone through the review process
with the SMEs and QA and had already been released to customers. The
writer writer who inherited my content made some major changes that
(IMHO) were unneeded (the software hadn’t changed) and decreased the
usability of the chapter. I just bit my tongue and tried to remember
that I’m a writer for hire, not a novelist. The company owns all my
well crafted prose, and they can do whatever they like with it. Even
if it does make me cringe occasionally.
I keep copies of things that I've written that I want to include in my
portfolio. And I occasionally drop my name into an example or screen
shot to "sign" my work. So if anyone ever questions whether or not I
wrote something, I can point to the fact that the example for an
administrator e-mail address just happens to be my name. It helped
that at my old job they mixed and matched employee first and last
names to create the data for sales demos and customer training.
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