Sarah Mei and Sarah Fox and some other people and I were talking on Twitter about code school graduates, and how they frequently do really well at mid-level positions because they have communication skills from their previous careers.
Been thinking about why there aren't, and it's because it's hard to promise someone will Make It Big as a tech writer.
Even if you’re coming out of a liberal arts/literary background, half of that list is something you may never have heard of. You can construct a great sentence, and you know how to use a semicolon, but your experience to date has rewarded you for things that don’t matter at all in technical writing. You’ve gotten good grades for making persuasive arguments or writing pithy literature reviews, but no one in my English Lit classes ever told me that I was addressing the wrong audience or designing my headings badly.
So that’s a daunting list of things to try to cram to get people into what is, let’s face it, a less glamorous profession than Code Warrior. I happen to think it’s the best and most influential place to be in a development team, but that’s not what the pay scales say.
That said, I think I could do a LOT with teaching code school students and other developers some really basic writing skills. I tried this out at a Workshop at Write the Docs this year, and it went pretty well. I’d love to present it elsewhere. I’m putting the outline below the cut, if you’re interested.
Give me your developers for a day, and I’ll teach them to write a well-constructed error code and a readable bug report and a coherent status email. Give me two days and I’ll teach them about audience and analytics and deletion.
I want to do this for code schools, so we can catch people when they are frantically learning, so they will remember to look it up later. I want to do this for open source projects, because it is so hard to find or hire a technical writer. I want to do this for conferences where junior developers are looking to elevate their game. I have been traveling around to developer conferences for several years now, trying to distill everything I know from 20 years of my career into something that has value for coders, and I am convinced it has value.
Who can check my work?
Reuse also means that there is overhead inherent in your documents. You have to compile.