I'd Rather Be Writing » preparation

Answers About the Field of Technical Writing for Students

Tom Johnson — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 16:15:51 +0000

In this monologue podcast, I answer a student’s questions about the field of technical writing, including how I fell into it, what kinds of projects I work on, and other details. Her questions are as follows:

What did you study in college and where did you attend?
What degrees/certificates do you have?
Did you know what you wanted to do before you graduated? If so, what was it? Is it what you’re doing now? If not, why did it change and are you glad it did?
What is your current job title and description?
How did you come across your current job?
What did you go through to get this job? Applying, interview, training, etc…
How long have you held this position?
What activities, responsibilities, duties, knowledge, etc. does your position require?
What have you done to maintain your success in this field/position?
Have your position and/or responsibilities changed over your time with this company?
What past jobs have you had? Were they helpful when starting your current job?
Did you study technical writing in school or was this learned/gained through the employment that you sought and obtained?
What tools (including computer software) do you most frequently use? And what tools do you most highly recommend to other technical writers?
When you were younger, what was your dream job? What’s your dream job now (if it’s not your current job) and do you plan on trying to pursue it anytime in the future? How will you do that if you plan on it?
Had you heard of technical writing before your jobs that were in the field? If so, what did you think of it and when you got involved with it in your past/current employment how was it different/similar from your previous expectations?
Can you ever see yourself working in a position that doesn’t require writing or some form of technical communication? Why/why not?
How would you describe your personal writing style? Do you think that at work this style is stifled because of the nature of your work or restraints/company policy?
Why did you start your blog? Where do you get the ideas for your posts and topics from?
Have you ever considered quitting your current job to work solely on your blog? Why/why not?
Is there anything that you’ve ever had the urge to write about to include on your blog but you haven’t actually done it? Why/why not?
What advice, if any, do you have for me, a soon to be college graduate wishing to enter the field in the next year or two?

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Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and the Real Reason You Are a Successful Writer

Tom Johnson — Wed, 13 May 2009 13:39:38 +0000

Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success challenges assumptions about innate genius and natural-born talent. Through a series of detailed examples, Gladwell explains away these gifts by attributing them to practice, timing, circumstance, upbringing, culture, and opportunity. In other words, those really smart, successful people we admire—Mozart, Bill Gates, the Beatles—weren’t born with natural talent. Instead, they had the right upbringing, were in the right place at the right time, and through 10,000 hours of hard work and a few lucky opportunities, landed success.

Although Gladwell’s Outliers has been criticized for drawing generalizations from a “flimsy selection of colorful anecdotes and stories,” and his argument borders “social predestination,” according to the New York Times, Gladwell’s conclusions do provoke a lot of thought and self-reflection. If you look at the reasons why you’re a successful writer, you may find it was due more to circumstance, practice, and upbringing than any gift you were imbued with from birth.

For example, rather than this model of success:

Common misconception about how success happens

This is really what’s going on:

The real story of success

Practice

Gladwell says most experts accrue about 10,000 hours of practice before they develop their talent. For example, the Beatles spent two years in Germany playing long hours each day (8 hours a day, 7 days a week, for a good chunk of the year) before they became famous. Bill Gates spent hours and hours programming (20 to 30 hours a week), skipping athletics and even sneaking out at night to get in computer time. Although Mozart was skilled at the piano, he didn’t start writing his own compositions until he reached 21 years of age (prior to that, he mostly played compositions that others wrote). If you add up all the hours of practice from those who possess talent, and compare them to those who lack talent, the numbers explain a lot.

Timing

Gladwell relates several examples of people who were successful because they had the right skills at the right time. For example, William Joy (who wrote Unix) learned programming before it became popular. Just about the time he accrued 10,000 hours of programming practice, personal computing arrived, making the scene perfect for someone with his skillset to exploit the market.

As another example, in the 1940s and 50s, lawyers skilled in dealing with hostile takeovers and litigation suddenly became highly sought after, whereas years earlier the practice was considered shady. Those lawyers who accrued the practice before the skills were valued after became wildly successful.

Culture

To illustrate the importance of culture in success, Gladwell relates a story of a Colombian pilot who most likely crashed a plane because, even with diminishing fuel, he wasn’t assertive enough to stand up to the intimidating control tower agents and demand to land. Cultures that encourage passive submission to hierarchy, or who phrase their questions in subtle, vague euphemisms, may find themselves at a disadvantage in some situations, such as the airplane cockpit.

Other times, your culture works for you. For example, Gladwell explains that Asians who spent centuries working in rice paddies, a type of farming that requires meticulous care all year long, passed on this work ethic to their posterity. Many of the inheritors of the rice-paddy culture apply the same diligence in their schoolwork. This diligence, of course, brings more success.

Upbringing

The way you were raised, namely with wealthy or less fortunate parents, also plays a role. Gladwell explains that when wealthy parents drive their children to the doctor, they tell their children things like, “Johnny, now if you have any questions, be sure to ask the doctor. This is your opportunity to talk to him about any health problems you’re having….” And so on.

In contrast, the children of poor parents may feel less entitled to this same questioning. Instead, they accept what the doctor tells them straight out, without surfacing concerns or criticisms. Gladwell then uses Chris Langan, a genius with a 195 IQ who wasn’t able to succeed in college, as an example. Langan failed to get a PhD (his goal) not because he lacked intelligence, but because he had a mentality to passively accept the conditions and limitations others imposed on him. Langan ended up dropping out of college because he couldn’t convince his teachers to accommodate a simple change in his schedule (a change he needed because his truck broke and he could no longer get to campus early in the morning).

My Story

I found it impossible to read Outliers: The Story of Success without looking more closely at my own story of “success.” Obviously I’m not a success like the people mentioned in his book, but I am a professional technical writer with a well-known blog and podcast. How did I manage that?

First, I wrote extensively in junior high, high school, and college. My father, a lover of literature, frequently put books in my hand, established a model of reading, and shared his passion for literature and ideas. My mother made every effort to open opportunities for me, sometimes working two jobs to help pay for my undergraduate education.

After college, I continued writing daily through a three-year MFA program at Columbia. Rather than study fiction or poetry, I studied literary nonfiction, particularly the personal essay. It was my good fortune that I graduated with the degree I did at the time I did. When I graduated in 2002, the blogosphere erupted. It was the perfect time for someone with skills in short personal essays to flourish.

My foray into podcasting follows a similar pattern. Although I don’t have an audio engineering background, much of my success in podcasting comes from my interviewing skills, from my ability to find people and get them to open up. From 1994 to 1996, I spent two years as an LDS missionary in Venezuela, interacting with strangers ten hours a day. Each morning we ventured out into unknown barrios, knocking on doors, talking with people in the streets, talking with people in their homes, befriending members and anyone we came in contact with. It was a social immersion in another culture, but it was also training ground for podcasting, because although I’m generally shy and will keep to myself, I feel completely comfortable approaching strangers and interviewing them in a conversational, natural style. I developed a skill that became extremely useful at the right time.

My facility with WordPress also fits into the equation. I’m comfortable with WordPress and can create websites fairly easily, but it wasn’t always this way. As a composition instructor at Columbia, I created a website for my students because I saw the value of student-to-student interaction. I then created an elaborate website teaching at the American University in Cairo. I spent months painstakingly figuring out how to do technical things. I also had a sister in graphic design and a brother-in-law in interaction design that I could occasionally rely upon for information.

More valuable than specific technical knowledge, though, I learned how to solve technical problems. I learned patience to search forums, persistence to query search engines, and a trial-and-error mentality that encouraged experimentation as a solution. This ability to continue plugging away at a problem, especially when the answer isn’t easy, is a skill incredibly useful for IT (and it’s what enables people to excel at math, according to a study Gladwell cites). When I stumbled upon WordPress, I already had hundreds of hours working with websites, and I brought that skillset to the existing scene and combined it with my writing and interviewing skills.

Besides timing and practice, I also attribute some of my success to lucky opportunities. When I applied for my first job in technical writing, the writing portfolio I submitted included an article about protein, which I’d written as a copywriter for a health company (a job I got through a connection from my techie sister and brother-in law). The hiring manager had a PhD in biology and could see that what I wrote about protein was, in fact, clear and accurate. Not only that, she knew it was a difficult concept to write about. It was precisely because of this article on protein that I was hired, even though I had no experience in technical writing. It was a lucky connection that opened up an opportunity for me.

I’ve also been fortunate to never have technical writing jobs that required more than 40-hour work weeks. I frequently hear about people routinely working 60-hour weeks, which would preclude any spare time for blogging and podcasting. Instead, even with three kids, a wife, and other commitments (such as being a scout leader), I manage to have most evenings and weekends free.

And speaking of that wife, she turns out to be another huge factor in my writing, since she not only writes in an engaging way that motivates and inspires me but also helps create a safe writing environment in our home. When I turn on my computer, she doesn’t pull me away to mop the floor (not usually, anyway). Instead, she joins me and we write together on the couch, sharing thoughts and experiences with each other. When I married her, I never anticipated that our lives would be this way, but it did and has made a significant difference in finding time to write.

Not all of my background, however, works positively toward success. If there’s one thing I’m conflicted about, it’s my lack of a sense of entitlement. For example, I’ve always felt hesitant about returning items to stores, about raising my hand to offer criticisms or complaints in large groups. I sometimes devalue my contributions at work. Frequently I’m content to accept my surrounding conditions and the status quo because either I don’t think I can change it, it requires too much effort, or I don’t care.

After reading Outliers, I find myself acting more assertively. I catch myself when I’m being passive, or when I don’t feel qualified or entitled to something.

I realize that a sense of entitlement is usually looked at negatively (certainly it can lead to arrogance and pride), but not having any sense of entitlement can be stifling. People who don’t feel entitled to anything lack confidence and self-esteem. They accept their conditions. They do what their superiors tell them. They lack ambition and don’t challenge the status quo. They second-guess their worth, attributing any modicum of competence to other people and circumstantial factors. It’s a self-defeating, trapping mentality that limits your ability to succeed because you don’t feel entitled to success.

My point is not to give a biography of my life, but rather to illustrate Gladwell’s point: if you start looking at the underpinnings behind your success, you can start connecting the dots to see how you arrived where you did. It usually isn’t that you have a knack for a certain profession, but that you acquired the necessary skills through practice, upbringing, environment, culture, and lucky opportunities.

Outliers reminds me of a scene from the movie Good Will Hunting, where Matt Damon, playing a poor teen from the South side of Boston confronts a rich MIT student. Damon tells him, You were born on third base and you think you hit a triple. In other words, we often over-attribute our writing successes to our natural talents. But really, those talents and abilities came about through a series of explainable, fortunate circumstances that we should recognize and be grateful for.

Resources

Buy Outliers: The Story of Success from Amazon

See Malcolm Gladwell’s blog

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STC Summit Atlanta Adventures: The Agony and Ecstasy of Presenting

Tom Johnson — Fri, 08 May 2009 22:57:34 +0000

STC Summit in Atlanta

This week I returned from the annual STC Summit in Atlanta. Every year is always a series of adventures at these conferences. I’d never been to Atlanta before. I arrived a day early, because I was originally scheduled to give a workshop on blogging, but it was canceled due to lack of participants. Attendance at the STC Summit overall was down by about 35%. I was relieved, however, at not having to put together a long workshop in addition to three conference presentations.

As soon as I got to the hotel, I ran into Alan Houser, the program chair of the conference, who asked if I wanted to eat dinner. I attribute much of my good luck in getting conference proposals carefully considered to the fact that Alan is a long-time listener of my podcasts.

The next day I decided to get some exercise. I’d been reading about a Run-n-Shoot Athletic Center, which had 10 indoor basketball gyms. The concierge confirmed the place existed, even though they never answered their phone. I took a train and then bus out into the West End to find the place. Getting outside the downtown district with all the fancy hotel and conference centers was an eye-opener, reminding me of scenes from the Bronx.

When I finally got to the address, the Run-n-Shoot center had been converted into a fitness center, the gyms converted to bowling alleys and skating rinks and playlands. The only remaining basketball court had a limited court time that ended a few hours ago.

I returned to the hotel and worked on my presentations some more. A couple of years ago, I was converted to a visual-based method of presenting. I hate extended bullets on slides, so my slides consist of nothing more than a title and an image.

To find the right images, I sometimes drag icons from Visio into Illustrator, make a few tweaks, drag them to Photoshop, make some more adjustments, flatten them, and then insert them into PowerPoint. The way I set up my blogging presentation, each slide was supposed to trigger a story, and then I had several points to cover, which I hoped to magically remember during the presentation without having a bulleted lists on the slide. This flexibility allowed me to go with the flow as I presented.

As I looked through the program, I realized that for some reason my presentation was an hour and a half instead of an hour. I only prepared for an hour and wondered when they might have told me my presentation was supposed to be 90 minutes instead of 60. They probably did tell me at some point—long ago—but my email inbox has a constant stream of messages that I often miss. I decided to splice in some tips on blog usability that I’d given in another presentation, just in case.

The Sunday before the conference begins is Leadership day. A few years ago I attended Leadership Day in Minneapolis and was excited about it, since I was a new chapter president at the time. This time around, however, I found my interest anemic almost from the start. Even with the first speaker, I surfed on my Windows mobile instead. It turns out the Society is either $500,000 or a million dollars in debt, and plans to rely partly on chapter finances to make it through. (Since our chapter seems to have an annual budget of $5 anyway, the restricted budget didn’t seem to have much impact, but quite a few people were vocal about it.)

After slipping away from Leadership Day, I returned to my hotel room to work on my presentation, to read more of Gladwell’s Outliers (which had totally hooked me on the plane), and to nap a bit.

The opening keynote by David Pogue the next morning was engaging and completely interesting—not so much because of his message, which was about the power of simplicity, but because of his theatrical, dynamic style. He knows how to deliver a keynote. I was laughing, shaking my head in agreement, twittering about it. The whole place was mesmerized. His presentation skills filled me a bit with dread towards my upcoming presentations, because I knew I couldn’t present like that.

Later that evening, I ran into Kirsty Taylor from Australia. I knew her from comments on my blog and Twitter, but she really is a fan of my wife’s blog, whataboutmomblog.com. She said she had some gifts from Australia for Jane and the kids. This amazed me—that she’d brought gifts all the way from Australia. I know I have a lot of blog readers, but my wife has blog disciples. I later interviewed Kirsty for a podcast, asking her why some blogs inspire devoted followers while others, like mine, simply invite casual attention. Not surprisingly, it’s the personal aspect of the blog, she said. Speaking to the reader’s heart and revealing appropriately, she explained.

When I presented on blogging, the session was full. I found I was able to remember most of what I planned to say, and not having bullet-by-bullet points on slides resulted in a conversation-like style, someone later told me. I breathed well and didn’t run out of content for the full hour and a half. My back started to hurt, though, from standing in the same general place so long.

I’m glad I had the opportunity to present on a topic I’m so passionate about. There are many things I’m somewhat knowledgeable about, but only a few things I’m truly passionate about. Blogging is one of them. My passion for it was apparent, and this enthusiasm made any nervousness disappear.

It seemed that after my blogging session, I ran into people I knew everywhere. Not just people who listened to the session, but people who had been following my blog, people in past chapters, past conferences, people whose blogs I followed, or people I knew from Twitter, and so on. I could hardly walk through a room without running into someone I knew, or encountering someone who knew me and wanted to say hello. My colleagues later told me that I was “amazingly social,” even though I find that comment surprising still.

After my blogging presentation ended, I started thinking about my next presentation—a 20 minute presentation about usability (“What you learn by watching others use your documentation”) in the Usability SIG progression. Usability is not my strength, but I’d given a videocast and written a post or two on the topic, which caught the attention of a SIG coordinator and he invited me to speak at a progression table.

I remembered a video I’d taken of Jane being frustrated at the computer, and I decided to use it to open up a few observations about what users do when they’re frustrated. Mainly, they don’t use help, even when they’re wringing their hands and cringing. I recommended moving the help into the interface, following some pointers Mike Hughes gave me in a podcast months before.

Progressions work differently from normal presentations. About six different presenters have round tables that seat a dozen people. Participants go from table to table, switching tables three times during the hour.

My table was next to some well-known experts in the field—Ginny Redish, Caroline Jarrett, Karen Bachman, Whitney Quesenbury, Chauncey Wilson, and Mary Deaton. Almost every one of them has either written books on usability or works as a usability consultant. When the SIG progression leader introduced me, she said, “And at the back table, we have the famous Tom Johnson …”

I thought this was funny, but it turned out to be somewhat true. It seemed that practically everyone knew me from my blog or podcasts. Even people I didn’t think knew me later added, casually during a conversation, “I feel like I’m in one of your podcasts, listening to your voice.”

My presentation wasn’t outstanding, but I don’t think it was bad either. Some said that overall the progression was the best progression they attended (I’m not sure if the same people actually came to my table). But I have to admit the progression format turns me off a little. It’s noisy. It’s weird. It’s short and seems rushed. Not many other people I met liked the progression format either.

I had one more presentation to give, this one a co-presentation with my Gryphon Mountain colleague about quick reference guides. Co-presentations, I’ve decided, are actually more difficult than single presentations, because you have to make sure the other presenter is prepared and that he or she won’t overlap topics, that your handoffs will be seamless, that you will appear as one rather than switching back and forth in awkward ways.

Also, I was a little concerned because my colleague was fairly new to presenting. He’d never presented at the Summit before, and he had a soft-spoken voice that made him hard to hear. I told him to speak up and avoid slipping into a monotone rhythm. He had a few note cards he used to remember his points on various slides, as did I.

The presentation wasn’t until late in the next day, so we still had some time. While walking about the vendor expo and meeting with people, I ran into incoming STC Toronto president Anna Parker-Richards, who I didn’t know. But as she was talking to me, I asked her about her chapter’s new meeting model, in which they charge $100 to $150 per meeting (or “event”). What she explained—the “Five and Five Model”—was so interesting I decided to record a podcast with her right there. That interview got me in the mood to record other podcasts, and soon I started carrying around my Zoom H4 recorder everywhere.

I interviewed Ginny Redish about her book Letting Go of the Words (which is really about writing web content). I interviewed Caroline Jarrett about her book on forms (Forms that Work) and why forms are important and interesting. I talked with Mike Hamilton about Madcap’s upcoming Flare-DITA solution, to Alan Porter about his book, the History of the Illustrated James Bond (and how James Bond relates perfectly to technical communicators). I talked with Sarah O’Keefe about her latest study on the state of structured authoring. I even spoke with some guy from the Netherlands and his method for prototyping with refrigerator magnets.

Tracking people down for podcasts is mostly a matter of chance. If I ever had a conversation with someone who was particularly interesting, addressing something new, such as a book or study or trend, I pulled out my recorder and asked if I could do a podcast right there. (When it comes to podcasting, I have no reservations about approaching a total stranger and interviewing him or her for a podcast. It makes the conference so much fun.)

Our quick reference guide session was scheduled for 5 p.m. on Tuesday—unfortunately at the end of the day, when everyone is tired. My colleague and I skipped some of the afternoon sessions to prepare. He practiced in the room, saying aloud his parts. On one slide I thought he had too many points for the lack of visuals, so I asked if he could make the commentary during some of the example slides. I rehearsed what I planned to say about design, but had to ultimately concede that, as much as I tried explaining it, design was like music. You could try to describe and explain how it works, but it was slippery and hard to pin down. Designs that work just feel right, regardless of any specific principles.

At five o’clock, the room was packed. No chairs were empty, people stood at the back and sides of the room, and there were even about 7 or 8 people watching from the hallway.

The lapel microphone wouldn’t stick on my colleague’s floppy shirt collar, so he held it in his hand. I buttoned up my shirt collar a notch so the lapel mic would be closer to my mouth. It worked, even if I looked nerdy. The room lacked a wireless mouse clicker, but at the last minute Jackie Damrau (who received a president’s award at the conference) retrieved one from her hotel room for us.

To start the presentation, my colleague began reading, in a funny voice, a cartoon he’d drawn. This made people laugh. Then we launched into the presentation. It went well for about the first 20 minutes, and more and more people started coming into the room. I could hardly believe how popular the session was.

Little by little, raised hands started to appear in the audience. First one hand, and then another, and another. It seemed everyone had questions to ask, which we tried to answer. Some of our answers related to slides to come, but I thought it best to give the answer now, with full elaboration, rather than wait. I think that proved to be a bit of mistake, because too many questions can kill the flow and rhythm of a presentation. For everyone that asks a question, there’s another person that doesn’t want to listen to someone asking a question.

Still, the majority of people remained engaged and interested in what we had to say. The quick reference guide examples provided visual appeal and were practical. My colleague projected well and covered good ground. More than a dozen attendees stayed after to talk to us individually, and for the next day people complimented us on the presentation.

But later in the evening, when we returned to our hotel room and checked the STC 09 Twitter feed, a tweet did provide a bit of a downer, because the person said we needed a moderator, more concrete examples, and that we were more frustrating than interesting. Negative feedback is sometimes hard to take, but it is more instructive in the long run, and I could see how to improve our delivery the next time.

That night, even with the sour tweet, having completed all my presentations, I felt a burden lifted from me. At the same time I wanted to collapse from exhaustion. I went to dinner with my colleagues and a few new friends. I thought a woman who joined us (Trina) had a foreign accent, but she turned out to just be from Milwaukee. Another LDS technical writer from Connecticut (Chris Keeling) joined us. A former drill sergeant and game aficionado, he had a love for his old blind and deaf cat, which he gave an IV to every day, he explained. The cat also drooled on his head in the morning. He and another woman, coincidentally, were both former military intelligence officers who translated Russian, or something.

As the night ticked away, I couldn’t help but feel satisfied both emotionally now that the presentations were over and physically now that I was eating.

After the final conference luncheon the next day, I still had a few more hours to kill. I had a goal to interview ten people for podcasts, and given my theme of recently published books, Karen Bachman recommended I talk with John Hedtke, who has published 26 books, his most recent one on Disaster Preparedness.

This was my first encounter with John. He was articulate and well-spoken. He explained why he wrote about disaster preparedness—”for the money,” he said. I prodded him a little more. Perhaps you had a disaster in your own life that motivated you to explore this topic? I asked. No, he said. I really just wrote it for the money.

While I was talking with him, though, he mentioned that he wrote in the evenings and weekends, after work. You mean you have a regular day job besides your book writing projects? I asked.

Apparently, yes. Computer books (most of what he’s written) have a short shelf-life, he explained. And most nonfiction books don’t make back their advance checks, which are usually between six to ten thousand dollars. Listening to John made me think twice about book publishing.

Regardless of whether I ever write a book, I reflected on the idea for a while in a dreamy way—thinking about possibilities and topics and who might publish it and whether it would be in color or not. Shortly after my conversation with John, I flew home.

Overall, the Summit is always a good experience because it gets me engaged in the profession. It engages me with presentations, which requires my best thinking, organizing, and delivery skills. It engages me with podcasts, interviewing people on the spot, drilling deeper into their knowledge. It engages me with new ideas through sessions from experts and authorities in the field. And it engages me with a new environment, surrounding me with new friends and a new city. It is a short stretch of time, about four or five days, but its effects last throughout the year.

By the way, this year all presentations (except the progressions) were recorded. You can buy the presentations from the STC (called Summit@aClick) for a price (no one knows how much yet). I’m told that I can also post my own presentations on my blog for free, which I’ll certainly do when they’re available.

If you enjoyed this writeup, see my write-ups from previous conferences: