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Letter to the editor
Jack Shaw
Littleton, CO
I was out surfing and for the first time in over a year, I decided to look in on your Technicalities issue to see what had changed.
As it has in past decades, the old visibility issue has again come to the fore. And since you asked for input, in my 40-or-so years in the tech writing business, I've seen this issue come up again and again. So as an ex-STC member, I can't resist throwing in a word from the sidelines.
Visibility in the tech comm world is, to me, a synonym for "nobody (in tech. development, marketing, customer support, maybe even at home) loves me." In past lifetimes, I attended daylong, group-grope meetings on how to improve the image of technical writing and raise the consciousness (we said that back then) of tech writers among other mainstream functional groups.
Usually, the result was a pitiful little pamphlet given out at project meetings to all who would condescend to read it. We'd later find them made into paper airplanes or being used for coffee coasters at subsequent planning and development meetings.
Other times, we'd "escalate" (we said that, too, back then) our point with a pitch to higher levels of product development, entreating them to please let us play a role early on in the next project. On that latter note, the adage of being careful what one wishes for comes to mind because, indeed, they indeed put us in early. We were typically designated as scribes or super-administrators with the charter to take good notes, type them up (we did that instead of keyboarding back then—on something called the Selectric or "golf ball" typewriter) but otherwise we should listen and keep quiet. We weren't really team members, as it turned out.
How might we have been taken more seriously? Well, with the license age brings, I can say now what I wouldn't have then.
- We weren't bonafide professional communicators, but rather cross-trainees from other areas: programming, hardware engineering, field service, the motor pool. People from any place the company could entice us with—yes, they really used this phrase—"a flair for writing."
Oh sure, we had done our college thing. Some of us were even English majors. But for the most part, we were transplanted techheads. In short, we weren't journalism majors or the like. And technical communication as a field of formal study was almost nonexistent. I recall two places that taught tech writing: UNC here in Colorado and RPI in Troy, NY. Bottom line: tech writers, unlike their colleagues in engineering, were a polyglot bunch with no certifiable skill set. We winged it, and sometimes it looked as though we did just that.
- We were, on the whole, managed by non-writers. There were exceptions, but most were themselves "lateral transfers" from other middle-level management slots where they had become redundant. It's not nice to say, but most tech-writing managers were Peter-Principle dropouts with little or no concept of what we did, no sense of advocacy for our task, and a real aversion to making it, themselves or us visible.
What could we have done differently? Lots. If it were (ahem) my company, I'd have:
Made our skills apparent to the developers and engineers by commandeering responsibility for early specification management, development and control. We'd have done a better job, done it faster, taken the specification monkey off the backs of the developers and been a focal point for project activity. That would have given us the knowledge to communicate as peers with the development drones.
- Used the above as the basis for true user-level information development. We'd have had leverage to define the user interfaces and been able to test our own information rather than cram it in the box at the 11th hour. Respect, visibility and attendant appreciation for our efforts would have come naturally.
But that's then. This is now. What to do in the current bleak market? The wisdom of this H.K.U. alumnus would say:
In this era of overseas outsourcing, stop thinking of IT as the place to be. With the impending onset of the non-event of 1/1/2000 it should have been apparent that a whole lot of IT people would be pounding the pavement. Thousands were parsing old iron code, and many more writers were employed as an adjunct to that apparently wholly successful broadside effort. Look to such fields as grant and RFP writing, health/medical and hard-core engineering communication. I myself am now a property assessor/appraiser and the technical writing skills I acquired serve me admirably.
Get grounded in another discipline. Medical technology, energy exploration/transmission, automotive/transit system design-something outside the cobwebbed halls of IT. If you can't change disciplines, at least move away from the conventional areas of software design/update/release. PCs and the attendant software are rapidly becoming commodities like pork bellies, and user information and interface design are part and parcel of software development—architecture and interfaces are predefined as use cases and rules. The system developer will soon do it all.
- Become multilingual in word and speech. The United States has always had a holier-than-them attitude about the preeminence of English as the language of business. It may well be. But it's no longer the sole province of native English-speaking countries. If there's any doubt, call your ISP help line and see who answers—I'd bet it's British English with a strong East Indian inflection. Accept the inevitability of the redistribution of technological wealth; you can't lick it, so learn to communicate with your non-English counterparts. I ride a motorcycle, and other like-minded people who do all say the same thing: riding makes you a better car driver. I believe that applies to mastering another tongue. It'll make your own native language skills sharper and more precise.
You might start with Hindi...
Cheers,
Jack Shaw
Littleton, CO
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