Re: Volunteer TW

[Camille Costa <ccosta01 -at- SPRYNET -dot- COM>]

I had a similar experience as a "volunteer" tech writer. After years of toiling in the
clerical trenches, I finally landed a job at a manufacturing firm as a technical writer.
I was laid off after six months but was fortunate to return to my old accounting clerk
job and even more fortunate to have acquired a new set of technical writing skills that
I volunteered to my boss.

She wanted new procedures written for the weekend staff to help them audit and correct
our office's accounts using our computer-based system. The "training manual" they were
using had been written a couple of years earlier by a former co-worker. It consisted of
nearly fifty single-spaced numbered steps of do this, do that, do the other thing in a
tiny, almost runic font that had readers trying to figure out whether the u's were
actually v's and if the v's were really x's. I saw it as a great opportunity to save my
co-workers' eyesight as well as their sanity, eliminate repeated audit mistakes and get
Accounting off my boss's back.

The first thing I did was break up the procedures into subheaded sections based on each
task and add the necessary "how to" that had been omitted from the original. I included
screen captures with figure numbers and captions, and referenced them in the text. After
a couple of days, I gave my boss a preliminary draft to look over. She flipped through
it, a bit dismayed at the added pages, and said that she preferred the old laundry-list
format -- mostly because that was the one she had used to learn and perform the audit on
the rare occasions when she couldn't find anyone to work. She even preferred its cryptic
font saying that she never had any problems reading it.

The only parallel I could find for her reaction was the imprinting baby birds do when
hatching. The first living thing they see when emerging from the egg they will identify
as their mother. As far as my boss was concerned, the old training document was Mom.

My co-workers who actually have to use the new document on a regular basis, however, are
enthusiastic about it. One of them told our boss that she prefers the new version
because it's easier to follow and the Times Roman typeface is more readable. (She was
never able to get the computer to print one report because she had been typing a V at
the command prompt instead of a U.)