atw: Re: 'Writers' or 'communicators'? (WAS: Re: Apart from usingWord 2002, what else am I doing wr

Allan Charlton:

> Somewhere there's a better description of what we do, and someday
> someone will stumble over it.

Ay, and there's the rub. "Communication" suffers from a serious problem, 
indeed: too many managers think of it in terms of "moving data around" rather 
than "getting ideas from one head into another". (The use of "communication" in 
relation to computers, rather than to people, is surely metaphorical.) But, 
equally, too many managers thank that "anyone can write".

But the reason I've always run courses in "technical communication" rather than 
in "technical writing" is simply this: the common idea of a writer (a novelist 
or 
whatever) is of someone who puts pen to paper or finger to keyboard to produce 
a text; they are answerable to no-one for what they choose to write. (Whether 
it 
sells or not is a different matter, but it's not the point here.) As I 
suggested in an 
earlier post, the focus of the technical communicator is not just to produce a 
text, but to participate in a process. It's too easy to think of "writing" as 
finished 
once the MS has been delivered; communication isn't finished until the reader 
has achieved his or her aims.


Michael Lewis

--------------------------------------
Brandle Pty Limited, Sydney, Australia
www.brandle.com.au
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