As
mentioned, I’ve been looking for work. Scoping the ads, I find that an old
prejudice that has been around for a long time refuses to die. It involves companies
looking for technical writers.
Think
about it, folks. When you were in college, did you ever meet an engineering
student who just devoured the English language? Of course not. If they had been
interested in writing, they would have been pursuing other majors. They took only
the writing courses they were forced to, and many of them still struggled with
writing coherent papers. Why then do companies continually look for technical
writers who have several years of engineering experience?
The
idea with technical writing is usually to take the jumble of engineerese that
initially “documents” a piece of equipment or a software package and translate
it so that the people who will be using the product can figure out how it
works. So how is an engineer who speaks almost exclusively in technical lingo supposed
to do that? Ninety-nine times out of 100, they can’t. And therein lies the
problem.
Suppose
we’re talking about the medical field. You go to the doctor—one who can’t
translate medicalese into English—and he/she tells you that you have pyrexia
indicative of acute rhinitis. You might suffer a myocardial infarction on
hearing that! However, if someone can explain the terminology to you, you’ll
learn that you have a fever, which is a symptom of your cold. You can therefore
avoid the heart attack.
Or
suppose you buy a video game, Japanese edition, and you don’t read Japanese.
You’re on your own figuring out how it works. Unless you are willing to spend a
lot of time at trial and error, you may never understand all the nuances of the
game.
The
same kind of thing is true for the products turned out by engineering firms. THEY
understand what they have created and how it works. Unfortunately, when they
try to explain it to the rest of us, they often want to include a lot of the
details that are irrelevant to the end user. When we turn on our computers, we
just want them to work and we want to know how to get them to do what we need
done. We don’t need the code and the backstory—we don’t speak that language.
Sometimes
engineers document in the opposite direction—oversimplifying, assuming that we
know much more than we do. Enter the writer, who can see the product in the way
that most users will see it and ask the questions they would ask to make the
product work. Most of the population needs instructions written in plain,
ordinary English that tell us enough, but not too much.
Example:
A software user manual may tell you that to insert a picture into a document,
you choose the picture from your library on the Insert menu. For most of us,
that’s backward. Better instructions would be: On top of the document page,
click the Insert tab. Then, in the Illustrations section, click Picture. This
will bring up your picture libraries. Open the folder that contains the image
you want; double click on that. The picture will appear in your document,
stretching to the margins of the page. You can resize it by clicking on the
image. Go to one of the corners and move the cursor until you get a double-headed,
diagonal arrow. Hold the left mouse button down and drag the corner of the
image until you have the size you want, then release the button. If you want to
center the image, highlight (click on) the image. Click the Home tab at the top
of the page, then in the Paragraph section, click on the icon for centered
text. (Which is how I inserted this guy.)
I’m
not knocking engineers—I’m married to one (who happens to be one of the 1% of
engineers who can write decently, and even he says it’s a major chore for him
because it’s out of his comfort zone). Engineers need the focus that they have so
carefully honed to be able to create the products that they make. I respect
that. I would not be using this machine if they did not have that skill. On the
other hand, they need to communicate to the rest of the world the benefits and
features of their products. They need to accept the fact that they are not often
the best people to undertake this task. Those of us who can translate for them
have concentrated on the skills required to make the translation, and should be
given equal respect for our accomplishments.
So
please, technical companies, realize that there is no shame in employing people
with skills other than yours. We are not a necessary evil. We are your
partners. We want to help you make your products successful. We can ask you the
questions that your users would ask, then write the answers in words they can
understand. We can not only help you document product function, but we can help
you market effectively. And we can also reduce the number of Help Desk calls
you have to field—I know how you love those! So you continue doing what you do,
and let us handle your connection to the outside world, okay?