Re: Academic careers with/vs. tech writing

Subject: Re: Academic careers with/vs. tech writing
From: Bruce Byfield <bbyfield -at- AXIONET -dot- COM>
Date: Fri, 5 Sep 1997 11:04:09 -0400

Mark Boyer <boyer -at- OPENMARKET -dot- COM> wrote:

>One can actually get a decent level of satisfaction in a real >job equvalent to what one is looking for. I've found that the >urges for the intellectual life that I thought could be >satisfied only by an academic career are in fact better
>satisfied by following my own interests and ideas and reading >in my free time

One of my biggest shocks when switching from academia to technical
writing a couple of years ago was the discovery that there's an
intellectual life off campus. Tech-writing is really an intellectual
job: you need to be curious, and quick on the up-take, and have a
genuine love of problem-solving.

I also found that teaching interferred seriously with my intellectual
interests. Ironically, since I quit teaching last December, I've had
more poetry, fiction, and academic articles published than in the last
four years as an instructor combined. I believe that all my creativity
was going into teaching. Now that I'm in writer's mode all day, I get
more of every sort of writing done.

Best of all, when I read the classics, it's because I want to. It's an
incomparable luxury to curl up with something by Dickens or Charlotte
Bronte or Wilkie Collilns, and read it entirely for pleasure.

In other words, I think I made the right choice. When I meet
ex-students, I tell them to go into tech-writing.

For years, arts students have worried that the world outside academia
doesn't want them. Well, now it does, and it's willing to pay - if not
always in as much cash as we'd like, at least in job satisfaction.

--
Bruce Byfield, Outlaw Communications
(bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com) (604) 421-7189
http://www.axionet.com/outlawcommunications
Job Bank Team, STC Canada West Coast Chapter
http://www.stc.org/region7/cwc/www/job_bank.html

"If you hear not, hear me never,
If you burn not, freeze forever,
If you hunger not, starve in hell,
If you will not, then you never shall."
- Peter S. Beagle, "The Last Song of Sirit Byar"

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