Lista Duren: Plumbing the Depths of Technical Communication

By Karen Field Carroll

San Diego STC member Lista Duren is all wet. As a volunteer diver for Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, she is submerged in the giant kelp tank at the Birch Aquarium. Several times a month, Duren, who is a technical communications specialist by trade, dons full scuba gear (including a special communications mask) floats among leopard sharks, giant sea bass, and other sea life, and answers questions from visitors to Scripps.

Lista Duren

Today, Duren takes questions from rapt schoolchildren gathered on the floor beside the tank who are visiting Scripps on a field trip.

"How often do the fish eat?" asks a young boy in the front row.

When a docent repeats the question into a microphone, Duren, who can hear the question from the tank, replies, "Some fish eat once or twice a week. Some fish don't eat for weeks."

"How much does that sea bass weigh?" asks a blond girl toward the back.

"About 450 pounds," says Duren. "But he's young. He'll grow to be about 600 pounds."

Diving in the tank and educating children about its sea life is just one way Duren applies her skills in technical communication. In fact, to people who consider technical communication a "boring" career choice, Duren's career, spanning 30 years and encompassing everything from writing proposals, marketing materials, freelance articles, and how-to books to teaching scuba classes at UCSD, is proof-positive that any career in technical communication pulses with variety.

Over lunch after the dive, Duren explains that her vocation began in an odd place.

"I was managing a framing shop near Boston," she begins, "and an editor from Houghton-Mifflin came in to ask if we knew anyone who could write a how-to book on framing pictures." She pauses. "I thought about it for six months, and then I called her back."

Duren, who earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Rice University, published Frame It, A Complete Do-it-Yourself Guide to Picture Framing in 1976 and Build Your Own Home Darkroom (Curtin & London) in 1982. By then she realized she had a talent for explaining things in plain English. Says Duren: "I learned to take a pile of information and find the story within it. In the process, I recast the story so a particular audience can understand it."

By 1985, Duren's talent for finding the story led her to a full-time position at BBN Technologies, where she worked as a technical writer, project manager, and network engineer. Her projects included writing the Maintenance Manual for Mobile SIMNET, a manual for a platoon of M1 and M2 tank simulators used in National Guard training. During her tenure at BBN, Duren completed an MBA degree from UCLA. Instead of transitioning into management, however, she spun her knowledge from the MBA degree back into technical communication.

"I keep coming back to technical communication because that's what I'm comfortable doing-writing," says Duren. "But I didn't know I had the talent until I wrote that book on framing."

In fact, Duren writes about any topic that interests her. She says feels compelled to learn about the topic, master its intricacies, and then explain it to others-something she's done in magazine articles like "The Great Getaway," a profile of a pilot and airplane builder, which she published in Coronado Eagle & Journal in April of 2003.

To explain something new, she says, "I start with what's familiar to the reader. Then I lead them quickly to some question. I show respect for what the reader knows, and I don't 'talk down' to readers. I go right to where they are mentally, and then I begin to paint a picture of the new idea."

Is writing books and articles much different from writing technical manuals? "Not a lot. But the audience is often different," she says. "With books and magazines, you're writing to a mass audience you can't know much about. With technical manuals, the audience is more defined. So is the topic. In feature articles, you tell a story. In manuals, the story is the product itself."

So what would Duren recommend to other technical communicators who want to apply their skills in new ways?

"Learn something new and then write about it. Take a class on feature writing at UCSD. A class I took recently taught me how feature writing has changed in the last 20 years." In other words, become an expert in a hobby, and explain what you learn to people who know nothing about it.

Duren, who just completed a short-term contract writing proposals for AT&T, can't seem to stop learning new things. She's taking flying lessons, building an airplane, and writing a biographical adventure story about air racing champion Ray Cote. As for her next career move, "That's a moving target," says Duren. "But no matter what, I want to ride the cusp between art and technology."

She also continues to educate the kids who come to see her dive at the Birch Aquarium, an endeavor that is not without risk. On a recent dive, a new mask left her cheek partially exposed, and a leopard shark mistook her face for a piece of mackerel. "The bite wasn't bad," she says, pointing to the half-circle of puncture wounds in her cheek. "But the hospital staff was fascinated. They'd never seen a shark bite before."

For Duren, that's just another day on the job.

Contact Lista Duren at lduren@pacbell.net.