For the past couple of years in October, I’ve gone up to Brigham Young University Idaho to talk to students at their professional writing conference. I’m going up there again this year. In preparation, I asked my colleague who teaches there whether students still think of technical writing as a sellout/fallback career, or whether they’re more seriously preparing for an actual career in technical writing. … more »

Today a reader said he found me through an article in the May issue of U.S. News & World Report. I couldn’t find the link to the article online yet. But if you click the image on the right, you can read a scanned copy in PDF format that the reader sent me. I don’t say anything that interesting or revelatory in the short blurb, … 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 … 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 … 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 … more »

One of the tough paradoxes of the technical writing field is that you can’t get a job without experience, but you can’t get experience without a job. Or so it seems. A reader recently wrote to me explaining how she decided to write manuals for her existing job as an account maintenance clerk, even though the task of writing documentation wasn’t in her list of … more »

CNN Money.com said technical writing is the #28 best job in the U.S., with an average salary of $67k and a projected job growth rate of 20% over ten years. Best is determined by “great pay and superior growth prospects. Work that’s meaningful.” Interestingly, 56.4% of technical writers say their job is “low-stress,” which makes technical writing the fifth least stressful job in the U.S. … more »

In previous posts, I’ve explored whether technical writing is boring. Penelope Trunk’s latest post, All advice on how to manage creative people is awful, made me see the topic of workplace boredom in a different light. Citing research in sociology, Penelope explains that “people who work are happier than people who don’t because people who are employed spend more of their time being creative.” Creativity, then, … more »

When I read about guys like John Gruber, who make their living from their blog, it fills me with envy. I want to do that. Not sure if tech comm’s audience is large enough, but perhaps someday.

John from Delaware, who has a job in technical support, asked my advice about whether he should become a technical writer. He expressed some concern about the field, explaining that since almost everyone can write, the skill of technical writing must be decreasing in value. For example, technical writing can be easily outsourced. In an economy of doing more with less, is it really a … more »

oDesk Reports “WordPress” Fastest Growing In-Demand Skill in 2008 « WordPress Publisher Blog Writing is second, SEO is fourth, CSS is about tenth.

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Writer Profile: John Hewitt, Technical Writer and Poet Warrior – Quiet Rebel Writer

Jayant writes, I am a technical writer from India. I just moved to the UK and find the scenario very different from India. Here technical writing jobs are not easy to come by – I understand this is due to the recession. I also have found my desire for technical writing waning away a bit. This could be because at my previous office, technical writing … more »