NOT WANTED-Technical writers

[Phil Teich <DavidF -at- APC -dot- NET>]

What utterly amazed me in 1976 when I began my career as a technical
writer was my discovery that scarcely anyone in business could write,
especially technical writers. For me it was demoralizing. Already age
36, with a checkered background that included field engineering, I
naively believed that the key element  in "Technical Writer" was
writer not "technical."

Why should it not be so? When I pick up a book, magazine, or newspaper
to read an article on a technical subject, the writer's credentials or
facility with quantum mechanics make little difference to me, if they
can't write. I am not--if I have any choice--about to waste my time
solving word riddles at the same time I am trying to understand the
subject matter.

For the same reason I refuse to let amateur mechanics fix my car,
unskilled surgeons rip open my chest, or inexperienced lawers
represent me in court, I do not want to read the writings of
non-writers, no matter how many publication tools they  know;
programming languages, understood; technical disciplines, mastered;
mensa tests, passed.

Professional writers have a million tricks to gain warmth, simplicity,

economy of expression, logical development, parallel structure,
take-you-by-the-hand exposition, and technical narrative to give you
goose bumps. This is a part of the air that cultures must breathe, if
we're to survive. Quality communication is everything.

Only in "technical writing." must I endure amateurism.  Here I am a
captive audience, forced to read whatever opaque, sesquipedalian,
overly academized nonsense the writer chooses to throw at me. If my
livelihood depends on knowing the subject matter I must become
inurred to all manner of verbal onslaught.

But, now, something is afoot that may shift some technical writing
paradigms--the Internet. Vast improvements in technical writing first
came with PCs and the Mac, because it moved technology from the
province of a small technical elite into the hands of ordinary,
workaday people. Is it not that, "Invention is the mother of
discovery?" Snaring a targeted reader on the Internet and impelling
him to read may be the greatest technical challenge and necessity of
all time. And technical writers--not readers- will have to make all
the adjustments.

Good technical writing, here we come!