|
Last month, we asked readers, "What did you do before you joined
the field of technical communication?" The answers we received
ranged from the technical to the religious.
Before you jump to the responses, however, answer this month's question:
What is your title now and where do you plan to go? Are you a
technical writer who longs for a career in user interface design? A
trainer who aspires to management? An editor whose pipe dream includes
writing scripts for documentaries? Let us know. We'll post answers anonymously,
and no, there is no such thing as a silly response.
Now, on to the answers for April's question...
"...the folks working at my company have surprisingly technical
backgrounds. At the same time, very few hold engineering degrees or
have worked as engineers. Among us are a former Navy nuclear reactor
operator, several electronics and military-trained technicians and
mechanics, several former teachers (physics, math, biology, English),
and someone who was the first woman to graduate from the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena. At the same time, we count folks
who have been artists or musicians (most of them still pursue their
arts), salesmen (firewood, roofing insulation, leather goods), a Catholic
nun, and an editor for 'Senior World.'
"Me? Shucks, compared to my co-workers, I'm still wet behind
the ears....I worked ten years at Convair (toolmaker) and another
ten at Brooktree/Rockwell (engineering tech). I discovered technical
communication when an STC member said 'You ought to be a technical
writer,' and I replied 'What's that?'"
***
"I taught grammar school (Grades 3 through 8) in the USA before
going to Japan to teach English in junior and senior high school there
for 13 years. When I returned to the USA, I got a job doing coding
and programming for a computerized translation program going from
Japanese-to-English and English-to-Japanese. This led to training
others to do my job, writing down the coding and programming procedures,
etc. This led to a layoff when the company's fragile bi-national partnership
collapsed...but the sellable skill I came away with from that very
interesting job was the ability to write procedures and document software.
And the rest, as they say, is history (or herstory, in my case)."
***
"Before entering the glamorous world of tech writing (or how
to write thousands of pages that no one ever reads), I was a broadcast
journalist. I worked mostly in radio, plus some cable TV, in the days
before Clear Channel bought every station in America. I was a news
reporter and anchor, and did some sports. The latter was my chosen
field in college, but I got side-tracked into hard news. After about
10 years of semi-fame and no fortune (a wage less than the burger-flipper
at McDonald's), I gave up the excitement and glamour of working nights,
weekends and holidays to enter the high-tech world of writing manuals
for computer network hardware. I still kept my hand in the media world:
I started a video production department at the first high-tech company
for which I worked. Except for a six-month fling as a systems engineer,
I have been in tech writing ever since. It has been almost 17 years
of wondering if my one reader will notice any of my efforts to provide
a useful book or the typo in six point Times New Roman in the middle
of the copyright page."
|
