Writer
Finds Her Niche Sooner
By Michael
Abrams
For most
of us, technical writing is something that happened while we were busy
making other plans. It's reassuring, then, to run into Gail Van Landingham.
She
set out to be one of us right from the start. She has been happily making
a living at it since 1977—not that her professional life has been
static.
Gail's résumé
doubles as a gloss of the high points of technical communication's recent
history. It's a reminder of how quickly the craft has had to evolve to
keep in step with the subject matter.
Gail began
work as a medical writer for Samaritan Health Services, a hospital in
her native Phoenix. At the time, she was finishing her master's in education
at Arizona State University, specializing in instructional media.
At Samaritan,
Gail penned manuals and brochures and also created presentations using
cassette tapes and slides for patients and health-care professionals.
She was multimedia before multimedia was cool.
That's also
when she got involved in STC. A colleague she met at an STC meeting hired
Gail to work at Syntellect, Inc., a maker of "voice-response"
software for banks. You know, the phone voice tells you to say "balance"
if you must know what's left in the account; and, if you must reach a
live person, you just say "expletive deleted."
She graduated
to Windows software documentation; then, in the mid 1990s, Gail started
producing online materials. Soon she found herself writing more and more
for online help and the Web. Gradually, the new media changed the messenger's
approach.
Gail now
says it's easier to write online help and then generate the print material,
though she volunteers that there are some who will strongly disagree.
For her part,
Gail says: "I feel more comfortable producing online materials. It
forces me to think in a very modular fashion and to figure out how things
link."
Gail also
is an advocate of single-source tools because, she says, they can make
a communicator's life a lot easier.
Another cause
for Gail is indexing. She insists that good indexes are necessary because
they make it easier for the customer, who she envisions as "that
person desperately trying to find something out in a rush."
Today, Gail
is senior technical writer at San Diego's DR Systems, Inc., a developer
of image management software for radiology departments. The DR Systems
software allows a radiologist to view images (such as an MRI of the knee)
on a computer monitor instead of viewing dozens of films on a light-box.
These images can be viewed and saved to a computer hard drive. The images
can also be burned to a CD or made available over the Internet so your
doctor can view them on a computer. You no longer have to carry a bulky
envelope full of film to your doctor.
So did she
ever want to be anything else?
Gail says she did once harbor dreams of becoming a rock star but then decided she didn't like playing her guitar in front of lots of people. Then she adds: "I really think I've found my niche." She sure did and sooner rather than later.
