How I expanded my concept of the technical editing role

I've been having a short discussion with Tom Johnson at I'd rather be writing about the new format of his podcast tech writer voices, and he asked about what I've been doing. My response got kind of long, and it's stuff I've been wanting to post here anyway, so I decided to write it up.

Several factors kind of came together for me last fall:
Tom Peters's work on personal branding (for example https://www.fastcompany.com/online/10/brandyou.html) and the Personal Service Firm (PSF) idea (https://www.tompeters.com/blogs/freestuff/uploads/PSFIsEverything.pdf).
Richard Florida's ideas about the rise of the creative class (for example https://dir.salon.com/story/books/int/2002/06/06/florida/index.html).
Daniel Pink on the free-agent nation and the rising importance of creativity https://www.danpink.com/pink.php.

Most of my life I spent in school, working minimum-wage jobs with bad managers to pay bills. Both of these environments work best when there is no individuality in the way you memorize the lessons or make the sandwiches, and I did really well in them. I figured I had my band during my free time, where I could channel all my creativity and ideas--it didn't really occur to me that I should be doing it at work too. Even after I became a professional technical writer, that old restricting paradigm was in the back of my head.

If you think about the future of your profession (pretty much any profession these days), the ideas in those books will shake you up a bit. So I thought about what I wanted my brand to convey, you know, just in case. I started along the lines of "I make sure technical documentation is the best it can be," and then I started tracing how to do that.

I had to understand learning theory and how the brain works. How to design information so that it matches reading/skimming/learning behavior. Ways to get and hold attention in the attention economy. Using story to help people understand and retain the message. (For a good, practical overview of a lot of these ideas, check out the book Made to Stick.)

Before long my brand had morphed closer to "I help you shape your message so the audience gets it. Really gets it." I don't have it worked out yet, but that's pretty much the idea. :-) It turned out that what motivates me, and what I love about the job, is not so much creating clean copy as creating effective communication.

This concept of what my personal work really is opened me up to seeing ways I could contribute beyond editing text. Editing text is still extremely important, but I started thinking that, really, if what we want to do is to get users the information they need when they need it in the best format--there can be more to that than putting great docs in the box and on the Web. It goes beyond just giving information to users, too. Tom talked about Help 2.0 on his podcast, and Andy Oram has a great article Rethinking Community Documentation. This idea really encourages community storytelling, in the sense of getting developers to tell stories about their experiences in a way that can help others when they encounter similar situations.

So there's that, and work has been pretty busy. :-)

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 24, 2007
  Harry, Interesting post. I never thought about having a personal brand as a technical writer. I can see that you've reflected a lot about this. Lately I've been looking for a more defined purpose with my blog and podcast. Maybe it's a brand that I'm looking for. Of course I agree that effective communication -- delivering information in a way the reader completely and quickly understands -- is a key part of technical communication. While I agree with that principle, my own personal brand or philosophy is a little different. Haven't figured that out yet. Tom

• Anonymous
  March 05, 2007
  i think writers and editors must understand the scarcity of reader time and effort, but i think that's always been true. recently i finished some work that came out pretty good. i leveraged hyperlinks to shoot off from the core story into deeper topics. is it a guidance win? not really sure. i'm somewhat reluctant to put my work against memes and popular culture, as our audiences differ. i'm also not sure what the difference between "gets it" and "really gets it" is. i guess i embrace the notion of great discoverability and structure, and appropriate depth, but what's new about this notion? the docs for postgresql are excellent. whatever technique used to produce them = victory.