Re: What students should know

[sanders_j -at- TBOSCH -dot- DNET -dot- GE -dot- COM]

Thing One: I wish I had learned more about group projects, how to manage one as
a group leader, and how to participate in one as a lowly tech writer. Academic
writing, for me, was largely "low well can YOU write?", not "how well can you
function in a group situation?"  Even though many technical writing situations
are different in any number of different ways, almost all of them have more than
one person doing the docs. If I had had more experience in group development of
a project, I wouldn't have made some of the mistakes I did.

Thing Two: How to build an index. I had to pick this one up spur-of-the-moment,
and I still don't feel my current methods are all that great (the "kitchen
sink" method of index building). I also wish a lot of other people had more
experience in this area, too. I still think that the bigger an index is, the
more likely it will have the reference I want under the name I think it will
be under, not whatever the people writing it wanted to call it.

I could go on, if you want more.


-John Sanders-

-GE, Shenectady-