Assessing your particular combination of personal qualities and work- related skills lies in the domain of vocational counselors. Some try to quantify “aptitude”—your talent in a subject area. Others believe it’s your enjoyment and desire that best determine your success at something. In the latter camp, the classic is Richard Bolles’s buoyant, extremely help- ful What Color Is Your Parachute?3If you still have doubts about where
A number of career guidebooks present skills-assessment methods based on what you enjoy. They suggest listing significant achievements from your past that have afforded you the most personal satisfaction, then listing the actual work you did, the skills you used (such as organizing, advising, selling, etc.), and the rewards you experienced. You can refer to the bibliog- raphy at the back of this book for suggested career guides.
Once you have a pretty good idea of your interests and abilities, use the “Winning Qualities” described in this chapter and the questions in the following checklist to decide if you are—or if you want to become—the right person for a technical writing career.
CHECKLIST 3–1. SELF-EXPLORATION
The “correct” answers to these questions are pretty obvious. They’re just here to help you think it over.
• Do you like to write?
• Do you like learning new things?
• Can you converse with “difficult” people and avoid getting into an argument with them?
• Have you ever negotiated a compromise between people who disagree?
• Have you ever drawn pictures, graphs, or diagrams to express concepts?
• When you can’t get the answer to a question after several tries, do you think creatively about other avenues to explore?
• Do you try to either appease or argue with someone who criticizes you? Or can you step back and weigh the criticism objectively? • If plans change unexpectedly, do you get upset? Or can you take a
deep breath and steer accordingly? • Do you keep your time commitments?
IT’S UP TO YOU
You can see that successful technical writers are self-directed, highly moti- vated learners, unintimidated by new concepts and terminology. You should have some of these qualities, if only in their embryonic form, before you consider tech writing. Many tech writers don’t have these qualities, but they’re not good tech writers.
This book assumes that you can develop any quality you want, if you really believe it’s in your best interest. And none of these generalizations about tech writers is meant to intimidate. You can always find people to tell you how hard something is. This book is about how to go out and do it.
Says Richard Bolles in an early edition of What Color Is Your Para- chute?, “Your interests, wishes, and happiness determine what you actu- ally do well more than your intelligence, aptitudes, or skills do.”4
If you don’t have a skill you need, you can learn it, provided you’re interested in doing so.
A former coworker, shy and conciliatory by nature, got a job at the most political, aggressive company in Silicon Valley. At the time, she told me, “The one thing I’m going to learn on this job is to be assertive.” Some years later, she’d obviously succeeded, and I asked her how she did it. She replied:
By dealing with people who were very assertive, I had to become assertive myself. I learned that I had to say no to people and not worry about what they felt, because otherwise they were going to tell me what to do and it’s going to have an effect on me. . . . If you look at how other people do things—how the engineers do things—they might be working 80 hours a week, and they’ll have those kinds of expectations of you. I have to be assertive enough to set my own limits and say no, this is what I need.
SUMMING IT UP
This chapter described the kind of person who becomes a tech writer and the kinds of backgrounds today’s tech writers have. The next chapter explores different kinds of technical writing and educational opportuni- ties that can prepare you for your chosen field.
1STC 1999 Technical Communicator Salary Survey (Arlington, Virginia: Society for
Technical Communication, 1999).
2WinWriters, “School’s Never Out,” January 2000, at www.winwriters.com/survey_
education.htm
3Richard Bolles, What Color Is Your Parachute? (Berkeley, Calif.: Ten Speed Press:
Updated annually).
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4
Get Ready
W
hen you first bought your VCR—or microwave oven or other tech- nological toy—and took it out of the box, did you read the unpack- ing instructions? Did you wonder who the writer was? Did you curse or praise him? Technical writing is so much a part of our lives that we take it for granted. Technical writers write everything from scripts for sales videos to the directions and warnings that come with an over-the-counter drug. This diversity presents a confusing array of choices to those con- sidering a tech writing career.What technology will you specialize in? This chapter will give you an idea of where to begin to look. Once you decide on a technical field, you’re faced with the perplexing variety of media that technical com- municators use to express concepts and describe products. Will you write articles, proposals, or Web pages? Or will you design presenta- tions requiring few words and many visuals? This chapter describes five major categories of technical writing and the communication media they use. It goes on to describe educational programs and other ways to acquire the knowledge you might still need to enter your cho- sen field.