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>Someone who writes Barbecue Cookbooks is working in the field of
Technical
>Barbecue Science and Application, but I would not think that a writer
of
>cookbooks is a Technical Writer
Maybe, but I was once hired to write documentation for a software system
with the exhortation, "What we want is a cookbook." And if the barbecue
cookbook was for a large, industrial-scale cooker and directed at
food-service institutions, many of us might consider the user guide
(cookbook) a technical document. It may be a question of how much damage
you can do without it that makes a user document "technical."
That said, it is unfortunate that we tend to focus so much on writing
about software and computers and other complex machines when we hear the
words "technical writer." It is largely unconscious but very limiting.
The world is full of opportunities for the kind of writing we do, but we
can't take advantage of them if we never think about them.
