I'd Rather Be Writing

This weekend I gave a keynote presentation titled "From Overlooked to Center Stage" at the STC Atlanta Currents conference. I usually write a series of posts that lead up to a presentation, but this time I decided to store up the posts and wait until publishing them until I actually gave the presentation. I also recorded the presentation, so I'll be posting that as well at the end. I've implemented a plugin that will link together ... Read more..

A Poignant Realization The other week at work we had a first-ever community developers conference. People from all over the state and even the nation came to the conference to participate in the community software projects. As facilitators for the volunteers, my colleague and I were asked to lead a tech writing "deep dive" for the participants who would be working as technical writers. We thought curiously about our potential audience. Would there even be any ... Read more..

The Problem: "Just a Writer" I started out as a technical writer for a large financial company in Florida. I'd transitioned over from teaching and copywriting, so I was new to the technical writing field. As I attended meetings for the projects I was documenting, I rarely said anything. I could barely wrap my mind through all the developer speak and jargon the other project members bandied about during the meetings. I sat there patiently in the ... Read more..

The Yearning: Career Trajectory Although my chief interest in life is writing, more literary writing than technical writing, not surprisingly I wanted something more from my career. I wanted my career to be fulfilling and worthwhile. At this time, I had been blogging for a couple of years and had recorded dozens of podcasts. I had talked to professionals in the field who had said things like, if all you do is write, you'll soon be ... Read more..

Catalyst 1: Audiovisual Role With the instability of contract renewal pending and the lack of housing in the desert, I switched jobs to a non-profit organization, the LDS Church, which had an agile environment and about 600 IT employees and was growing rapidly. They had already been coding an application for about six months and realized that they would need a professional technical writer to explain it to the audience. It was my first experience in an ... Read more..

Catalyst 2: User Experience We didn't have a very good support model for the application. It became clear that our service desk, which included mostly BYU students working part-time and supporting over 100 different applications, couldn't answer questions that users had. They would only escalate the questions to us. And not many of our customers trusted the support desk anyway. Eventually the project manager started forwarding customer questions to me. I became the go-to person to ... Read more..

Catalyst 6: QA Testing As if I hadn't already been wearing enough hats, participating in both design, support, training, and help, I soon started to wear another hat: quality assurance (QA). We use JIRA as our bug tracking tool. It's mostly used by QA and developers to log bugs, enhancements, and user stories. I always knew it would be good practice to keep abreast of the items added to JIRA, so I could know if the ... Read more..

Catalyst 4: Wiki Manager As if I wasn't already doing enough, I also started to wear another hat: wiki manager. It turns out I failed in this role, but I'll still include it here because it segues into another topic I want to explore, which is spreading yourself too thin. At the beginning of this essay I mentioned the community projects we started up. When you work for a nonprofit organization, especially a church, which people can ... Read more..

Crisis Point: Problems with Multiple Roles As my attempt to fill the wiki role failed, I started to realize how busy I had become wearing all of these hats. It seemed that I was always logging bugs, answering phone calls or responding to emails, or attending this and that meeting, championing for a redesign of a page, or coordinating with projects. The core help I was supposed to deliver wasn't getting done. I knew that I had ... Read more..

Epiphany: Cross Pollination Ultimately, what my colleagues had to say did have merit. There is a point that, in playing too many roles, you spread yourself too thin. You compromise your specialization and expertise as you step into unfamiliar territory. There is a limit to the number of roles you can play, and perhaps I had stepped over that limit. But I believe I also experienced the idea of cross-pollination. In biology, cross pollination refers to the ... Read more..

Story Now I have a confession to make. I really didn't want to talk about roles and hats and value. I wanted to talk about story. But I didn't want to talk about story directly. Instead, I wanted to illustrate it by structuring my entire presentation as a story. You've seen that with each of the headings, I labeled a component of the story. I began with a problem and a yearning, and moved through a series ... Read more..

[audio:http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3?http://idratherbewriting.com/podcasts/fromoverlookedtocenterstage.mp3] Download MP3 Length: 45 min. Powerpoint This podcast is a recording of the presentation I gave at the STC Currents conference titled "From Overlooked to Center Stage." If you read the essay and then listen to the recording, you'll notice some differences because (a) I can't remember everything I wrote in the moment that I'm presenting, and (b) oral delivery doesn't exactly work like a written delivery. Nevertheless, I tried to communicate the same story. Read more..