Download MP3
Length: 65 min.

Last week we recorded an Intermountain-STC chapter event, “Educational Programs and Workplace Practices,” held in Layton, Utah. The event included a panel of academics from local technical communication programs in Utah. We had six programs represented: BYU Provo, Westminster College, Utah Valley University, University of Utah, Utah State University, and Weber Utah State University. About 15 students and a handful of practitioners attended the event.

Here’s a description of the program:

It’s often a mystery to practitioners what Utah’s technical communication programs offer. Hiring managers are unaware about the knowledge and skills they can expect program graduates to have. And educators often struggle to understand workplace trends and realities. At this event, a panel of educators will describe their programs and discuss with practitioners the effectiveness of the coursework. Professionals in the audience will provide insight into current trends in the field. This discussion will be enlightening for all professionals, educators, and students in technical communication programs or fields.

Blog Sponsors

• 3Rabbitz book
• Webworks ePublisher
• Scriptorium
• Help Generator help authoring software
• Southern Polytechnic: Information Design and Communication
• Simplified English
• MindTouch
• Madcap Software
• Dr.Explain
• Adobe Technical Communication Suite
• Congree

The person I was talking to was in a PhD program. She said it often feels like, given the exclusivity of the academic publications and the disconnect between practitioners and academics, academics are just having a conversation among themselves. In fact, to access a journal’s articles, it costs about $30 per article. Full access to the Technical Communications Quarterly archives would cost £187.00. If this is the price for access, I can’t imagine many people outside of academia will access the articles.

Tech comm has always been primarily a practical topic, not a subject for study on its own in an ivory tower. With subjects such as philosophy or literature, sure, you can seal their publications in university libraries forever, with the expectation that only other academics will want access. But for a discipline geared towards improving the profession, cloistering up the research makes no sense. The result is a greater disconnect between academics and practitioners.

The way academics restrict access to their research makes it seem like they're having conversations among themselves only.

My criticism assumes that tech comm academics don’t do research for the sake of tech comm only, but to advance the practice of tech comm in the workplace. This may be a faulty, myopic requirement based on my practitioner perspective, but it seems that some influence or enhancement of the practice of tech comm is what drives the validity of tech comm research.

I haven’t said much about the readability of academic research. Mainly, I find the academic’s focus on rhetoric to be one of the great ironies of the academia. Rhetoric, so frequently emphasized in academic settings, is the art of fitting the message to the audience. Supposing the academic’s audience is the practitioner, does the way academics deliver their information — with academic jargon, endless explanations of methodology, and prose that strips out all sense of humanity — show any principles of rhetoric?

Since academics do understand rhetoric, I can only assume they are crafting their message correctly for their audience. That audience is other academics, not practitioners. However, if this is the case, then you have nothing but an inner circle of self-speak to other academics locked away in classrooms and university offices, too removed from the workplace to understand it, too insular to communicate outside of their lexicon.

I realize that scholarly publications charge for access to pay the costs of designing, printing, and archiving the content. So maybe I’m being unfair in my expectations. In that case, tech comm academics may be victims of academic traditions and culture themselves. To keep their jobs, academics must publish in journals using isolating academic discourse. They must target high-profile, peer reviewed journals that restrict access based on models of exclusivity and budgetary constraints. They can’t connect too fully with practical matters of the workplace and still maintain their validity in a traditional university curriculum (otherwise they’ll appear to be too vocational). In short, this isn’t the same culture as the world wide web.

I get that these realities underlie the academic-practitioner problem. The problem is that tech comm is unlike many other university disciplines in that it is so heavily focused on workplace practice. Yet there couldn’t be a larger rift than what exists between tech comm academics and practitioners.

I used to think it would be cool to one day get a PhD in technical communication, but the more I look into academic programs, the less I feel that such an endeavor would have any value. The research I would do? Recycled among academic archives, largely inaccessible from practitioners. Credibility? Mostly lost. Tenure based on influence? What influence? Academic-to-academic influence? How about readability? Only if you speak academese. If that’s the end result, what is the value of the tech comm academia? Without the connection to the workplace, research in technical communication lacks purpose.

Despite my railing against academia, I did do a little investigation and found that, with a $50 donation, I can get online access to the online journals that my alma mater subscribes to. So maybe I’m making a mountain out of a molehill. It would be great to see organizations such as the STC provide similar access (beyond the TC Journal), but I doubt there’s much of a demand for it. And that’s the larger problem — no demand for the academic journals. There’s no demand because the content seems to have little relevance. To be relevant, tech comm academics need to find better ways to connect with practitioners.

Blog Sponsors

• 3Rabbitz book
• Webworks ePublisher
• Scriptorium
• Help Generator help authoring software
• Southern Polytechnic: Information Design and Communication
• Simplified English
• MindTouch
• Madcap Software
• Dr.Explain
• Adobe Technical Communication Suite
• Congree

I somewhat disagree. When readers complain that writing is too long, what they’re really saying is that they’re getting bored. The length isn’t so much the problem as the content. They want to click elsewhere because they’re bored.

What Is Boring?

To better understand what defines boring, let’s look at a random article from the Technical Communication Journal – a journal that is known for being a bit on the dry side. As an academic journal, the authors perhaps feel constrained by scholarly conventions. These conventions involve omitting personal experiences, avoiding the use of “I,” backpedaling from straightforward speech, and taking as long as possible to get to the point. Here’s a passage in the August 2009 issue from an article about mentoring:

In our survey, we asked participants to explain any “risks” (Society for Technical Communication 2002), “constraints,” or “difficulties” they may have encountered in their mentoring relationships; however, we allowed respondents to interpret these terms as they wished. Their responses, which were lengthy and covered multiple issues, indicated that they defined these terms in a broad sense. Three readers (two of the authors of this paper and a graduate student) analyzed the responses independently and parsed each response to the questions into individual comments—the length of which was determined by topic rather than by grammatical unit. To ensure the reliability of these divisions, all three readers had to agree on the length of the resulting comments. As a result of the divisions, there were 267 comments.

Realizing we may have biased the responses with our example (“a student who asks her mentor for a letter of recommendation when she has performed poorly in the eyes of the mentor”), we tagged any comment that related to that example as a “metacomment” and excluded these responses from our analysis. We also tagged participants’ comments that were unrelated to the issue (such as comments about mentoring in general or comments about the questionnaire) as metacomments. That left us with 208 comments to categorize.

The readers then tried to categorize the comments using an existing taxonomy, Eby and Allen’s (2002) multilevel taxonomy of protégé’s’ negative mentoring experiences (see Appendix B), that we had revised to reflect a mentor’s perspective. For example, we took Eby’s category, Lack of Mentor Expertise, and changed it to Lack of Protege Expertise. We felt the taxonomy might be a valuable tool for organizing the results. We soon discovered, however, that the majority of the comments from our survey did not correspond to Eby and Allen’s taxonomy.

Although some of the comments fit into some of the categories (29%), most of the comments (71%) did not fit into any of the five categories in the Eby-Allen taxonomy of negative mentoring experiences. Therefore, the readers took the remaining comments and grouped them by topic and created a new taxonomy (as described in our Results section) to better reflect the academic mentor’s perspective. (p.250).

Are you bored yet? What exactly is it about this article that makes it boring? The authors do focus a lot on the process instead of the point. This may be a required academic convention for journal articles, but if so, perhaps it could be moved to some footnotes or an appendix. It’s the equivalent of describing the writing process. Can you imagine a post that contains the following?

First I made a series of notes on a piece of paper. The paper was 8.5 x 11 and purchased at Staples at a discount. The fact that the paper was purchased at a discount did not bias the way we used the paper. We made our notes in a dual column format, with pros in one column and cons in the other column. In my notes, pros is synonymous with advantages, while cons aligns itself with disadvantages, though it also included negative connotations. As I began to make notes, I also compiled a brief bibliography on the topic. Readings included both websites, blogs, and articles. STC publications were given priority as well as articles submitted to tc.eserver.org. With each reading, I added notes on index cards, which I then taxonomized into a hierarchical structure sorted first by author and then by date. The index cards were lined and initially encased in thin plastic.

It’s dreadful writing like this that partly discouraged me from academia. In addition to emphasizing seemingly unnecessary details, the writing omits any personal experiences.

I suppose I expose my biases here, but good writing mixes the personal and professional. In other words, good essays have a balance of personal experiences and ideas. You may only be a “narrative presence,” as Ted Conover explains, but don’t completely omit the personal if you want your ideas to come alive. The experiences you bring to the topic not only give the essay a engaging spin, personal experiences also usually bring in story, which is essential.

Story

Your writing will ultimately bore readers unless you can hook them with story. Story is the sine qua non of writing — without it, chances are what you’re writing will be lifeless.

When I refer to story, I’m not talking about Cinderella or Huck Finn narratives. Any time someone or something struggles to overcome a problem, that’s a story. The problem could be purely conceptual, such as a philosophical idea you struggle against. Better stories have characters (perhaps the character is you) that experience a change to overcome the problem, but that change isn’t always necessary. A bare bones story simply needs conflict. However you tackle it, when you approach your posts from the perspective of story, the writing gains propulsion and keeps the reader engaged.

A while ago, I read a chapter in a book — Ivan Tors’ 1979 memoir, My Life in the Wild — that provides somewhat of an example with the power of story. Tors is probably an author no one has ever heard of. And rightly so — his prose is pretty bad and unenlightening. I bought the novel at a thrift store looking for some cheap adventure nonfiction. However, in his chapter “In Cold Sweat,” he nails the story technique.

Ivan is an animal expert accompanying a video documentary team in Kenya. On an outing to observe migrations of animals from the dry Serengeti to Lake Victoria, his jeep’s water pump gives way, stranding him miles from camp. As he starts walking back to camp, he realizes something is following him. He writes,

As soon as I began my long walk, I heard the yellow grass rustling behind me. I turned and looked. There was an enormous female lion following me, just sauntering behind me. I knew that I must not run or I might provoke an attack. When a 500-pound body pounces on a human back, something is bound to give. I knew what I had to do. I must disregard her and do nothing that would excite her, but I could not help thinking about my friend who was killed by a lion, and this did not do much for my morale.

At this point, Tors has our attention. The conflict is clear: he is stranded in a hot desert with a lion surreptitiously following him. Because the reader is somewhat hooked, Tors can move us in whatever direction he wants now. He can launch into exposition about the behavioral patterns of lions, and we will still remain attentive because of the story. And this is exactly what he does. Tors explains,

Lions have formed the habit, during the many millions of years of successful existence, of surprising their prey. This means stalking them from behind against the wind and jumping on their backs when an attack is least suspected — usually breaking the back of the prey. Antelopes, for their part, have learned that frontal attack is unlikely and that spotting al ion and not running is the safest tactic. If an antelope herd sees a lion, they usually turn toward the lion and stare him down. The lion, thus discovered, becomes confused, and then disappears to try his luck on another herd of antelopes that perhaps will remain unaware of his presence.

Were it not for the story, this exposition about the behavior of lions would quickly tire us out. Likewise, if we were only fed details about the experience, without the information of the lion’s behavior, the story wouldn’t be as engaging. It’s the combination of personal experiences and ideas narrated against a conflict that makes writing interesting. (I scanned the “In Cold Sweat” chapter and converted it to PDF format here if you want to read it.)

You may object that I’m comparing apples to oranges with my examples. Clearly the Technical Communication Journal’s articles follow one style, and Tors’ literary memoir another. However, regardless of genre, if you follow the story, mixing personal with professional, you can usually keep the reader’s attention page after page.

For example, an article on mentoring could perhaps begin with an anecdote about a mentoring relationship that went sour, which then prompted the author to survey other academic mentors as to whether their mentoring relationships were also strained and why. A 17 page article on mentoring could be peppered throughout with personal experiences and reflections from different mentors about the root causes that destroyed their mentoring relationships.

I recognize that this is not the academic way, that injecting the personal element presents the possibility of bias and of conclusions drawn from anecdotes rather than empirical research. While I recognize this, I think you can’t omit the personal without suffering the consequences: with few exceptions, the reader will get bored. The personal element plays an especially critical role with blogs, since many readers value the honesty and transparency that comes from personal exposure.

Blog Sponsors

• 3Rabbitz book
• Webworks ePublisher
• Scriptorium
• Help Generator help authoring software
• Southern Polytechnic: Information Design and Communication
• Simplified English
• MindTouch
• Madcap Software
• Dr.Explain
• Adobe Technical Communication Suite
• Congree

For the past couple of days I’ve been in Idaho at a pre-professional writing conference at Brigham Young University – Idaho. The purpose of the writing conference is to bring in published novelists, poets, editors, and professional writers to give students a glimpse into the careers they plan to enter.

Recommended link: If you’re looking for a small liberal arts school, check out San Diego University of Phoenix.

This is my second year presenting to students about technical writing. You may remember my post last year about Debunking the Boredom Myth of Technical Writing, in which I tried to disabuse students of the idea that technical writing is nothing but boredom and drudgery. This year I focused on Seven Steps to Getting a Job in Technical Writing. But that’s not the focus of this post. This year the conference made me reflect on the academic life I chose not to follow and evaluate whether that choice was right.

A little background. From 2002 to 2004, I taught writing courses at The American University in Cairo (in Egypt) with about 20 other composition instructors. Among those instructors, I met Josh Allen and his wife Suzy, who quickly became our best friends in Egypt. I had so much in common with Josh – both of us were composition instructors. Both of us were Mormon (the only Mormon teachers at AUC). Both of us were married and had children about the same ages. Both of us were first-timers in Egypt. Both of us shared a love of writing, literature, and the university setting.

After a couple of years at AUC, I questioned whether teaching was my vocation. Grading was drudgery, composition syllabi were a bit dull, and my job seemed to have little future. I looked ahead at several options: I could remain a composition instructor, continuing with roughly the same pay and lifestyle, with little prospects of advancement, only to find that at age 40 I had no real career. I could get a PhD in literature and try to move up the academic scale as a professor. As a professor, I would need to publish scholarly essays regularly. Or I could reject both of those options and follow a prompting I kept feeling – to be the writer rather than teach writing.

I chose the last option. After two years, I ended my teaching career at AUC and moved to Florida, where I turned to professional writing, first becoming a copywriter and then a technical writer.

My colleague Josh took a different route. He left AUC at the same time I did, but he applied for a teaching position at BYU-Idaho, which recognized his MFA as an acceptable degree for teaching literature classes. He moved to Rexburg, Idaho, a small town that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the college, and started his four-classes-a-semester schedule, comfortably settling into a spacious home with a garage the size of an airplane hangar.

Every morning Josh wakes up early for his 8 a.m. classes, starts discussions about classic works such as My Antonia or The Catcher in the Rye or some novel by Henry James. He has one or two technical writing or composition classes a semester. He meets with students, reads at length in his office, and lives the academic life.

The life of an academic seems rich to me. Not materially rich, but intellectually rich. Dozens of books line your shelves, you’re immersed in constant learning, you’re surrounded by ambitious, dreamy-eyed students who haven’t yet become jaded. You have summers off, during which you can bury yourself in the novel or short story collection you’re writing. Even during the semester, your schedule is flexible enough to come home in the afternoons.

Being at this writing conference, surrounded by academics discussing recent books they’ve read, listening to a poet read his work, hearing a novelist discuss how she adds energy to her fiction, how she gets inside her characters’ heads to imagine how they would act in certain situations, made me remember my creative writing days at Columbia’s School of the Arts as both a student and graduate instructor.

As a student, I spent much of my time reading and writing, cut off from the world around me. I had freedom to roam the lost books in the library, to open a blank page and fill it with everything and nothing. I rarely looked at a clock. I could latch onto an idea and pursue it wherever it would take me. Every week I wrote dozens of pages. Our classes met in workshop settings, where we talked about narrative structures and character significance and arc.

I also taught composition courses to college freshmen and had freedom to assign my own essay prompts. I would spin controversial ideas for students to write about and then respond to their essays with copious feedback. Sometimes I assigned essays as prompts.

I could have continued in that academic setting, perhaps pursuing a PhD and turning to others publications. I could have looked for a job at a small liberal arts school somewhere.

Instead, I chose to become a technical writer. I figuratively turned in my university library card and stopped trying to publish creative works. I now wake up in the morning and drive to work, parking my car outside a shiny high-tech looking building. After riding the elevator to the third floor, I make my way to a cubicle where I dock my laptop, read and respond to emails in Microsoft Outlook, and work on help materials for a handful of software applications. I devote my time writing for users whom I will rarely meet.

Did I choose the wrong route? Should I instead have pursued a teaching position in a small college in a sleepy nowhere town? Should I be waking up in the morning reading Henry James novels and preparing notes for an 8:00 a.m. lecture?

I talked with Josh about company life versus academic life, and which one was better. Josh had previously spent a few years as a contract technical writer before teaching, but he found that documenting software all day left him with a sense of emptiness. It provided no thought-provoking discussions; it lacked immersion in good literature. The whole endeavor felt a bit worthless. It was just a job for a paycheck, with no intellectual engagement or inspiration.

He had just returned from teaching a class on My Antonia when I met up with him. He had been discussing “the search for the American Dream” and how the idea plays out in Willa Cather’s plots.

Josh has a sharp mind and can extract and analyze reasoning from any subject you bring to him. As we walked around the gardens of BYU Idaho’s campus, he asked what appeal the company life has for me. Why would anyone choose to work in a company rather than burying themselves in the classics and academic discussions? What value does the company life have for me?

Talking with Josh about academic versus corporate life while sitting in BYU Idaho's gardens

Honestly, I didn’t know. It troubled me. As I slept that night, I tried to figure out what had propelled me to move away from academia into the corporate sphere. Did I make the wrong choice?

The next day we talked some more. I began to see an argument forming, but it wasn’t entirely clear. It wasn’t until I listened to a Book Lust podcast with Michael Perry, a nonfiction writer, that I began to understand. In an interview about his creative works, Nancy Pearl asks Perry:

You’ve now written four books and they’re all about your life and your experiences in the world …. Talk about how that all came about.

Michael responds:

The reason the books are as they are, is that I was always living and working in a “real” place while I was writing. So when I had the opportunity to write books, I just wrote about what was around me. And part of that was being on the local volunteer fire department with my brothers and my mom, and being a resident in a small northern Wisconsin town, and now that I have a little family and we’ve moved to a farm and we’re raising our own food or most of it. I guess for me, if I’m going to write creative nonfiction essay style work, if there’s going to be any veracity to that work, it comes from actually living it.

In other words, living and experiencing the world gives you content for your writing. It gives you substance to write about in a natural way.

This substance is exactly what I lacked as a grad student in a creative writing program at Columbia. We had time to write, time to read, but no substance in our writing. Our essays ended up exhausting our personal experiences. Our lives seemed all we had to write about. I ended up writing missionary stories about my two years in Venezuela. Another student wrote about her dying mother with cancer, another about her stint as a nurse in a psychiatric ward, another about her sordid affairs with married men, another about her past relationship with a rich guy in Soho.

While the essays had all the literary devices of narrative fiction, the writing lacked substance and information. It was too navel-gazing and self-centered. It was hard to get outside of our lives, trapped in the cloister of the university. It was almost as if our lives had been paused the minute we entered the writing program. We could only look back on what had taken place before.

I listened to another podcast with writers who explained the same problem. One of the writers had a good friend who moved to Ireland so she could write. In Ireland, she hunkered down in solitude and wrote and wrote and wrote, but her writing lacked substance. The sentences were highly refined and polished, but boring. Those same events that seem to take us away from our writing are also what give us substance in our writing, or so the writers on the podcast explained.

A writer needs to be immersed in the world to have something to write about. You can only experience and learn so much from within the walls of a classroom. This is one reason I like Ted Conover so much. Conover goes out into the world and lives and writes about it. For example, he spends a summer riding the rails with hoboes (Rolling Nowhere). Or he moves to Aspen to live among the rich (Whiteout). Or he becomes a prison guard at Sing Sing (Newjack). His living in the world, almost like a social anthropologist, provides him with material to write about.

Conover explains,

I feel a writer’s real job is to be out there with people who are strange to you.

Could he have written any of his books while being cloistered in the university? His work is nonfiction, but even fiction writers can’t imagine everything sitting in a library.

As much as I like Ted Conover’s immersive method, it seems a bit difficult for me. I can’t simply uproot and immerse myself in an unfamiliar setting. But entering the field of technical writing (rather than remaining in the university) has given me substance to write about. Immersion in projects within a corporate setting brings up all kinds of issues to write about — wikis, content strategy, community, DITA, usability, print versus online formats, quick reference guides, single sourcing, help authoring tools, the STC, presenting at conferences, context-sensitive help, podcasting, and so on.

If you were to take away my experiences in the company setting, the thoughts and problems and ideas and situations that arise from being involved projects, you would also take away all the substance from my writing. I would be in the same situation I was in grad school, twiddling my thumbs looking for content from random personal experiences to string together. Having a career in the world gives me a framework of content to write about, which I can approach from a literary perspective. I can take a topic that might otherwise be dull and make a story out of it. I can approach an issue as a literary essay, mixing personal experience with information and reflection. The result won’t be navel-gazing and insubstantial.

I’m not saying that academics can’t venture out into the real world. Nor am I saying that being a technical writer is the equivalent of an anthropological experience like Conover’s. I am saying that perhaps for a literary writer, it’s better to avoid the cloister — in whatever form, not just a university. Venturing into the world gives you something to write about.

You can make other arguments about the value of company life over academic life. For example, living in the world allows you to carry out the ideas of the classroom. Or the world allows you to prove and evaluate what you read in the library. Or the world gives you an opportunity to serve others with the knowledge you acquire in the university. But for me, as a writer, it comes down to having substance to write about, and that substance isn’t always apparent inside the classroom.

Some subjects will always remain at the university, I imagine. Arcane philosophical discussions, abstract discussions about the American Dream, or transformations of identity through the writing process in John Barth’s novels (my undergraduate thesis). But I am happy to leave those ideas in the classrooms. An idea that only has merit inside a classroom, that emerges from an assigned text, may be refreshing, but it is not the substance of my life.

Blog Sponsors

• 3Rabbitz book
• Webworks ePublisher
• Scriptorium
• Help Generator help authoring software
• Southern Polytechnic: Information Design and Communication
• Simplified English
• MindTouch
• Madcap Software
• Dr.Explain
• Adobe Technical Communication Suite
• Congree

Blog Sponsors

• 3Rabbitz book
• Webworks ePublisher
• Scriptorium
• Help Generator help authoring software
• Southern Polytechnic: Information Design and Communication
• Simplified English
• MindTouch
• Madcap Software
• Dr.Explain
• Adobe Technical Communication Suite
• Congree

Last night, unable to sleep at about 4 a.m., either because I went to bed early or because I simply couldn’t sleep, I grabbed my BlackBerry, on its usual place on my nightstand, and began to read through my email and feeds, as I am accustomed to do, lying half-conscious on my pillow, when I saw this intriguing question from Harold Motley about whether the transition from literary studies to technical communication was fairly common, or rather difficult.

Harold writes,

I’ve just recently came across your website and I find your posts and podcasts very informative and interesting. I’m currently a third year undergraduate student studying English, philosophy and professional writing. In exploring possible post-undergraduate paths and careers, I have been extensively researching the careers of law and technical communication.

My strongest skill is writing; and most of the writing I do is through the form of papers, essays etc. in which I analyze text and form arguments. In addition to applying to law school I am also looking for other careers in which I can apply my strength and interest in writing.

I have looked at M.A. programs in Technical Communication and found a few in Chicago (where I live) and I was just wondering how beneficial this degree would be if I were to pursue a career in technical communication.

I do not have much technical knowledge aside from the standard programs like those in Microsoft Office. Would this hinder a successful transition into technical communication, or is the technical knowledge something I would acquire through grad school?

I’m planning on taking a technical writing class and another on writing & the Web, which I think would act as a good intro into technical communication. Is the transition from literary studies to technical communication fairly common, or is it rather difficult? Also, what’s your opinion on a M.A. in Technical Communication and Information Design vs. a M.A. in Information Architecture?

I greatly appreciate any feedback you can give.

Harold

To summarize, you’re debating between a career as a technical communicator or a lawyer, and you feel an inclination to pursue a masters program in technical communication because your strength is writing. If you pursue this route, you want to know whether you should get an advanced degree in some technical communication/information design/information architecture field.

First, let me say that I have no idea how to advise you. And according to Joel Spolsky and Dave Winer, the blogosphere has too many examples of people expounding on things — often from anecdotal evidence — without having any expertise in the subject.

In that spirit, I direct you to the excellent post Scott Nesbitt wrote yesterday, which is amazingly and coincidentally relevant to your question. Responding to the question of whether would-be technical writers should take courses, Scott writes,

If you want to [take courses in technical writing], fine. I’ve never taken a formal technical writing course and I’ve done OK. That’s not quite true; in the late 90s, I did start to do a certificate program in information design and finished about half of the required courses.

Essentially, I’m a street-trained technical writer and technologist. I learned the basics of tech writing from a textbook that I bought at my alma mater’s bookstore in the early 1990s. I put what I learned from that volume into practice by writing manuals for myself and for a community environmental group with which I volunteered. I critiqued those manuals, and others that I read. I wrote articles for technology publications. I taught myself HTML, graphics conversion, various computer skills, UNIX, and even tried to get a handle on SGML.

But a big part of my development as a technical communicator was the two years that I spent working at a financial software firm. Long hours, a mix of applications running on Windows and OpenVMS, and a lot of developers with a low tolerance for ignorance honed various skills.

That’s not to say a technical writing course won’t be useful. I just never saw the need for one. (“Becoming a Technical Communicator”)

Rather than putting all your effort into a technical writing course, Scott recommends you acquire technical knowledge related to whatever it is you’re documenting:

Aside from basic computer skills, you should have (or plan to acquire) a good level of technical knowledge. At the very least, you should have a cursory knowledge of the key technologies you will or may be working with, of programming and scripting languages, and more.

I echo what Scott says — if you need to know Java, or HTML, or some other technology, learn it. It may be more valuable to you than an academic degree.

Scott also brings up the importance of acquiring technical knowledge to gain respect from other team members. (Note: If respect is important to you, be sure to read this guest post: Technical Writing Careers – The Raw, Unvarnished Truth.)

About applying to law school — when I was in college, I had a similar dilemma as you. I didn’t know whether I should pursue law or writing. My father supported me in either direction, but he thought fondly of the idea of my “sallying forth to battle the evils of the world through law,” or something to that effect.

I decided, for reasons I can’t remember, to go in the direction of writing instead. A few years later, while I was getting an MFA in creative writing, I became friends with a Columbia law student. Often at his house there would be dozens of law books lying around — half read, with bookmarks in various places. I realized, looking at his reading, that I never had an interest in law and could care less about this or that legal decision. I looked back to my deliberation between law and writing as foolishness.

So my advice to you on careers is this: What kinds of books do you have lying around your house? What are your real interests? Are you looking into law because you find law interesting, or because it’s one of those classic careers that everyone considers?

Now granted, it’s unlikely that you have a bunch of technical writing manuals lying around your house. (If so, you are weird.) Most likely you have literary texts here and there. You should know that technical writing is not the same as literary analysis, but it is still writing. As a technical writer, the kind of content people pay you to write is not creatively fulfilling. But that doesn’t mean it’s not challenging — it can bend your mind in exhausting ways.

A 250 page manual for a complicated product may be more difficult to write than a master’s thesis. It may require a massive amount of deductive and inductive logic, as you try to figure out how the product works. You may spend months interviewing subject matter experts, asking them hundreds of questions about how the product functions, and then hundreds more to clarify their cryptic answers.

Once you accumulate a massive jumble of information, you’ll rack your brain trying to organize and arrange the content in a way that fits the vocabulary and behavior of your audience. You’ll shape and craft the manual, analyzing how each topic fits into the whole. You’ll shave words and phrases to increase the conciseness, rearrange one paragraph with another, deliberate over word choice and semantics, and consult various style manuals to ensure proper word choice, formatting, and punctuation.

As you near the end, you’ll go through the tedious editorial process, reviewing the printed manual with a red pen, circling, crossing out, writing notes, and then inputting your edits. Once you finish, you’ll feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment and breathe a heavy sigh of relief. Does this sound like a familiar process to you? It should.

Much like a scholarly essay on literature, almost no one will read it, except a select handful of people whom you will never meet. But you’ll still feel a lasting reward knowing that you conquered a monster and helped people come closer to the application truth, similar to how a literary scholar unfolds a book to show how the text really functions.

In brief, yes, your preparation in literary studies will prepare you well for the analytical and exhausting challenges of technical writing.

As to the question of which masters program I recommend, again, follow your interests. However, I see a lot more jobs for technical writers than I do for information architects or information designers. Given the state of the economy, you might not want to confine your specialty to a small niche that sounds cool, but in the end isn’t marketable.

Here are some other posts on the subject:

• Technical Writing Careers — Answering 13 Questions About Technical Writing Jobs
• The Question No One Asked Me at the Career Advice Panel, Thank Goodness
• Personal Essays on a Technical Writing Career — By John Hewitt
• 14 Widespread Myths about Technical Writing
• Is technical writing boring?
• Going Beyond Technical Writing: Practical Advice for Diversifying Your Skillset
• Technical Writing: Worth it? Interesting? Creative? Well-paid? Answering a few questions from Saudi Arabia
• Ten Technical Writing Stereotypes
• How to Break into Technical Writing
• Is Technical Writing a Calling or a Job — Recommended DMN Communications Podcast

———-
photo from Flickr

1. Employers looking to hire candidates for the long-term primarly look for assets such as business skills and leadership qualities rather than tool knowledge.

2. In tech writing programs, students should learn tools on their own.

3. The question of whether academics are out of touch with the real world is unfounded.

Allison made her slides available here. Below are my reflections on these three ideas.

What skills do employers look for?

In this talk, Reynolds says employers see mastery of some tools as evidence for your ability to learn new tools. So if you know RoboHelp and Paint Shop Pro, but not Flare and Photoshop, the employer won’t scratch off your name as someone unqualified because you don’t have the right skill set. If you know some tools, you can easily learn new ones. It’s the ability to learn that is more important than any particular knowledge you may already have.

In one of her questionnaires, a hiring manager wrote:

As a (past) hiring manager, tools’ skills are not a priority. If a CV shows the candidate has used a variety of tools that is evidence of adaptability and learning skills.

If the actual tool that I use is not on the list but the candidate has used more than one tool (or more than MS-Word), then usually the candidate will be able to pick up my tool with little difficulty.

Should students be responsible for their own tool learning?

For the most part, yes, students should learn tools on their own. However, I think a couple of tools classes in college wouldn’t hurt. I actually wished I’d double-majored in graphic design or computer science and English (rather than just English). At least some kind of surveys class on tools should be required.

Academics argue that tools change too quickly to be valuable for instruction, and that focusing on tools lowers the quality of education to the vocational level.

That may be partly true; however, tools are critical skills that tech writers need to get jobs. If you can’t use a graphics program, don’t understand styles in Word, have little idea how to create an online help file, and don’t know what content management means, you’ll be at an unfair disadvantage in the marketplace. You need some basic skills to get your foot in the door.

Still, the burden for learning tools should be on the student, simply due to the variety of tools and the need for students to be self-learners.

Are academics out of touch?

This seems to be a particularly controversial question. I’d say the answer is both yes and no. Last year after I attended several STC Summit sessions led by academics, I started growing a little weary of attending presentations by academics. For example, one session was supposed to explore how online mediums are changing the kind of information we can deliver to our audience.

The biggest point of the session was that online mediums allowed for a multitude of audiovisual content that, prior to the Internet, would have been impossible.

As a case in point, the presenter discussed the Ivory-billed woodpecker. Scientists weren’t limited to a few still photos and journal-written descriptions to make their case for it. They could present a multitude of audio and visual files through the web medium.

That was the point of the entire session. I kept wondering if I missed something, or if the presenter was going to take it a step further, but it remained pretty much just that.

On the other hand, I did attend another presentation by an academic on the psychoanalytics of Web 2.0 that turned out to be informative and gripping. He had a good understanding of the topic and explored it from many different angles.

He also had his pulse on the audience’s interests and followed them into a long discussion about whether blogging was potentially self-damaging. For 2o minutes people talked about the dangers of Web 2.0.

While some academics might be in touch with the topics and issues of the day, others aren’t so much. In this talk by Allison Reynolds, I definitely think she is in touch with the issues and needs of today’s marketplace.

The podcast has a great deal of discussion about these points. Some of it is hard to hear because capturing group discussions is difficult, but it’s a thought-provoking podcast to listen to. Thanks STC Atlanta for recording it and making it available.