Students Contemplate Whether a Technical Writing Career Will Be Fulfilling

Tom Johnson — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 14:41:47 +0000

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. My colleague responded:

They’ve chosen professional writing as a career because doing so is prudent (or at least more prudent than choosing creative writing or college teaching). They may wonder, however, whether they can really be happy in a career as a technical writer. The professional world is a bit of a mystery to them, and they wonder whether they’ll really end up content as professional writers. They sort of feel that they’ll never know this until they try it, but that after they try it, it’ll be too late to go back and do something else. There’s a sense of entering a career path sort of half blind. Anything you could do to answer whether they could really be happy in a career as a tech writer would help them out a lot.

I’m at a loss for how to respond to this student dilemma. How do you know whether technical writing is the right career path for you? I’m really hoping you can shed some light as to how I could help students resolve this dilemma.

A student contemplates whether a career in technical writing will lead to a fulfilled/content professional career

In previous collaborative posts, I created a Google doc to collect the responses, but in the last collaborative post, most people just added comments below the post itself. The latter method seems more practical. I appreciate any insights you may have.

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Generational tech guilt?

Tom Johnson — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:46:40 +0000

Who is to blame?

In one of Alistair Christie’s recent podcasts, he interviews his 70-year-old mother about how she uses computers. Although they cover many topics in the interview, her tech guilt is the most salient part of the discussion. She blames herself for not understanding how to work computers and navigate websites.

When she can’t locate certain features on an interface (for example, Paypal), her first inclination isn’t to blame the bad user design of the site or software, but to think that somehow it’s her fault for not understanding.

The self-blaming attitude reminds me of a passage I read in Authentic Happiness years ago. Happier people, the author wrote, don’t blame themselves when things go wrong. Rather, they tend to see others as responsible. I’ve often reflected about this, most often while playing basketball. After throwing a “bad” pass that my teammate misses, I used to say, “Sorry,” or “My bad” — blaming myself. But after reading the book, I decided that it’s the other’s fault for not catching the ball. The pass was decent enough. Embracing this attitude, I feel better about myself.

However, clearly this attitude fails in other contexts. Not taking responsibility for blame is one of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Team members must take responsibility for both successes and failures, and not play the blame game. The same is true in marriage. No matter how much you may have initially resisted a decision, if you relented and went along with it, you can’t jump ship when the result is disastrous.

It seems, then, that at times you should include yourself in the blame (such as with teams), but other times you should not. The next time you’re frustrated with software, do you blame yourself for being “technically stupid”? Or do you blame the developers for the idiot design? The answer reveals a lot about how you view yourself.

I'd Rather Be Writing » happiness

Students Contemplate Whether a Technical Writing Career Will Be Fulfilling

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Generational tech guilt?

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