Re. writer/engineer relations

Subject: Re. writer/engineer relations
From: Geoff Hart <geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>
Date: Mon, 14 Aug 1995 09:22:55 LCL

Dick Dimock reveals why he is indeed, an artfully senior technical
writer, in his telling comments on writer-engineer relations. (No,
that's not as prurient as it sounds!)

I started my career by trying to be an anonymous editor, writing
corrections and dropping them into the internal mail without ever
meeting the authors. This lasted about a week (i.e., until the first
author came back from vacation and dropped in to ask about my
corrections). We had an interesting conversation, and got to be
reasonably good friends thereafter.

Over the years, I've learned the truism that engineers, and their
scientific and other colleagues, are people, and except for those who
are Microserfs <grin>, have lives outside their work. Most of these
lives are interesting, and most of the people are worth getting to
know. I've long since made it standard editing practice to chat a bit
about non-editing stuff too, and the result is amicable relationships,
and much more tolerance for my work. (I'm not sure why it took me a
full week to understand this, other than the vacation coincidence.
Yes, sometimes I do need to be hit with a 2X4 to see the obvious...
remember, I'm a "professional idiot", but the latter half of the
phrase occasionally applies solo.)

The trick is not to interfere with the "real" work that the engineers
do. This puts them behind schedule, and like any other discourtesy,
makes it harder to maintain amicable relations. It also helps if
you're sincere.

--Geoff Hart @8^{)}
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

Disclaimer: If I didn't commit it in print in one of
our reports, it don't represent FERIC's opinion.


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