Ten Lessons for Technical Writers - Part 2 of 3
Last time, I mentioned completing several high-speed book-writing assignments. For one of these book assignments, I had to rewrite an existing book. But the publisher had lost the original book file, and I didn't feel like typing the whole thing over again.
I found this guy, Jim Adams, who had a scanner with an automatic feeder that could feed in all the pages of the book, OCR the whole thing, and output a file ready for me to update. It took about 3 hours, and during that time, I watched Jim in action. He was a freelance computer consultant par excellence.
For example, he got a call from someone who wanted to translate one kind of strange data format into another strange data format. "Sure," Jim said. "I can do that." He hung up the phone and said, "Now who do I know who can do that?" His attitude was: get the assignment first, and then figure out how to complete the assignment to the satisfaction of the client. He was confident that – somehow – he could satisfy the client. From him, I learned Lesson 5: Always say Yes. These days, only if the assignment is completely beyond the limits of my abilities – and there's no way I can possibly acquire the expertise elsewhere – do I ever say no.
The second main event was getting laid off from the well-paying programming job that I got after I stopped teaching. I now had a house, a wife, and two babies to support. I was desperate. I pounced on a one-month contract to test a new software product for the then-Digital. I spent a month testing this obscure new piece of software. Then I got the bright idea of trying to sell an article about the software. BYTE Magazine was interested, and I got my first magazine publication. Nice, but the story doesn't stop there.
Two months later, Digital needed someone to write the manual for this software. Guess who had in-depth experience with the product, a background in programming, and several publications under his belt? Me. That manual-writing led to training-course writing and a full year of work. That taught me Lesson 6: You never know what obscure little experience will land you an assignment.
I found this guy, Jim Adams, who had a scanner with an automatic feeder that could feed in all the pages of the book, OCR the whole thing, and output a file ready for me to update. It took about 3 hours, and during that time, I watched Jim in action. He was a freelance computer consultant par excellence.
For example, he got a call from someone who wanted to translate one kind of strange data format into another strange data format. "Sure," Jim said. "I can do that." He hung up the phone and said, "Now who do I know who can do that?" His attitude was: get the assignment first, and then figure out how to complete the assignment to the satisfaction of the client. He was confident that – somehow – he could satisfy the client. From him, I learned Lesson 5: Always say Yes. These days, only if the assignment is completely beyond the limits of my abilities – and there's no way I can possibly acquire the expertise elsewhere – do I ever say no.
The second main event was getting laid off from the well-paying programming job that I got after I stopped teaching. I now had a house, a wife, and two babies to support. I was desperate. I pounced on a one-month contract to test a new software product for the then-Digital. I spent a month testing this obscure new piece of software. Then I got the bright idea of trying to sell an article about the software. BYTE Magazine was interested, and I got my first magazine publication. Nice, but the story doesn't stop there.
Two months later, Digital needed someone to write the manual for this software. Guess who had in-depth experience with the product, a background in programming, and several publications under his belt? Me. That manual-writing led to training-course writing and a full year of work. That taught me Lesson 6: You never know what obscure little experience will land you an assignment.
posted by Ed DeJesus at
8:21 AM
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