By Daniel Maddux | Member
The path
Most technical communicators seem to fall into the profession. I didn’t.
Coming out of high school, I knew that I wanted to be a writer. But what kind of writer? I love creative writing, but I had no intention of being a starving artist.
I took a technical writing course as a sophomore in college, and was immediately hooked. What drew me in was the challenge of making information work for people. It wasn’t like creative writing, wherein I express myself and hopefully other people get something out of it. No, with technical writing, I either provided my audience with the information they needed, in a way that they could use it … or I didn’t. Pass or fail. What a challenge!
I pursued a degree in technical and business writing. Good heavens, the University of Houston–Downtown has a great degree program! I was ready for the workplace when I got out.
I immediately landed a job with a small technical writing company, where I was able to both receive some good training and work with a lot of independence. I wrote a lot of process and procedure documentation, and eventually got into project management. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my experiences there were preparing me to strike out on my own, soon.
The plunge
On 1 July 2010, I went completely independent, devoting myself to developing Elite Documentation, Inc. (EDI). My talent and experiences had prepared me to run my own show, and the time was right.
Now, usually when a technical communicator decides to go solo, it’s because a “sugar daddy” company has called him or her up, saying, “Hey, if you go out on your own, I’ll give you work.” As writers, most of us tend to be a little timid, and we want that safety net.
I didn’t have a safety net. So I’ve had to be much more creative in how I target my clients. Really, I much prefer it this way. Technical communication companies normally become beholden to a single client or industry. The scope of Elite Documentation’s (EDI) work is very broad, and we’re meeting needs that most companies can’t.
But it is harder to do things this way. There are no handouts for EDI. So we have to work harder.
The pathogens
Certain myths plague my work these days. Have you ever read a job listing for a technical communicator position with an oil and gas company, which says that applicants “must have five years of oil and gas experience”? Now, for most positions, that mystical five years won’t actually help the applicant do the job (I explained why in the February and May 2011 editions of Intercom). But if you don’t have it, the door may be completely barred to you.
This kind of foolhardy snobbery may not apply to you, or if it does, it may just mean that you are a bit undervalued in your job. However, for me, these kinds of myths are matters of life and death. While I have worked in oil and gas, if a company does not value skill in organizing and writing technical information, and rather wants “an engineer who writes good,” then EDI doesn’t get the project. That means there is no bread on my table.
It’s going to take a lot of substantive research to debunk these kinds of bad ideas. We need to further develop and standardize the dollars and cents value of really good technical communication.
The progress
But the problems that hold back the field of technical communication don’t stop us from creating tremendous value. One thing that EDI is doing now is developing services that target small- to mid-size businesses, meeting their documentation needs in ways that are cost effective for them, and still allow us to make a profit. Most smaller companies can’t get good tech writing help, because they can’t afford for technical communication companies to deal with them in the same way that we deal with the big dogs. But by using customizable templates, and other methods, we’re changing the sorry state of small companies’ documents.
It may take a long time for us to really change the world, and vastly improve the field of technical communication. But it’s coming.
