Re: Hideous grammar

Subject: Re: Hideous grammar
From: "Janet K. Christian" <janetc -at- AUSTIN -dot- APPLE -dot- COM>
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 1995 09:47:19 +0100

Chuck Mccaffrey wrote:

>As a Marxist, I believe that we should all be paid the same, too, but
that's an argument for a different day and place. The problem, I think,
in the disparity between the salaries of programmers and tech writers is
the misperception both by management and by many if not most tech writers
and tech writer wannabees that anyone with a good liberal arts education
must therefore have good writing skills, that people with good writing
skills must therefore make good tech writers, and finally that tech
writers and tech writer wannabes are a dime a dozen because it's darned
hard for such liberal arts majors to find jobs as experts on the history
of Victorian England and American poets of the post_WWI era. In fact,
most such folks make miserable tech writers. As proof, I point you to
this list and the discussions that take place on it. But since such folks
are so numerous and so difficult to employ in their fields of study and
expertise, there is a glut of tech writers and tech writer wannabes.
Hence the lower salaries.



Thank you Chuck, for your soapbox dissertation. I have run into many
situations over the years where I was viewed as little more than a
glorified clerk typist who was expecting to receive source materials in an
almost complete manner. I had one programmer actually refer to the
technical writers one day as "those people who flowerize our writing." Most
of this attitude from programmers comes from their own past experience of
working with "technical" writers who have good English skills but who think
that C is nothing more than the third letter of the alphabet. These writers
are perfectly skilled at running end-user applications and writing about
them ("This is the name field; enter your name, last name first.") But they
are not adept at writing quality software reference manuals where the
audience is system programmers. As a programmer, I can remember trying to
use these manuals. They were frustratingly sparse in the low-level
technical details.

This type of past experience with arrogant programmers has left me, well,
sensitive on this issue. I apologize for those I've offended here, but I
truly do see two distinct types of technical writers -- just as there are
two types of programmers (application and system). Both have their value,
and both are important. And both types of writers should receive different
compensation, just as a UNIX shell programmer is paid more than an
inventory database application programmer.

I can already feel the heat of the flames,

Janet


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