Reading about the augmented future of technical communication triggered a memory. Many years ago, when I worked at Computer Associates, they produced a product called CA-7/OLC. (I think that was the abbreviation.) It was an enhancement to their CA-7 software, which is still used for scheduling jobs on big old mainframe computers. The interface for CA-7 was, of course, the good old green screen – green text on a black background. The software came on – are you ready, kiddies – magnetic tapes. CA-7/OLC was different. The demo included a large piece of hardware that played a 12-inch laserdisk. (Gee, I forget the names of all the parts after all these years.) The product was on a PC using 3.5-inch diskettes, and the laserdisk had some additional magic not possible on the PC back then. When you ran the program, you saw the usual green-screen interface. Slightly boring, with a…
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Yesterday, I expanded on some of the reasons why the world needs technical communicators that were proposed by Ben Minson. My latest challenge from Problogger is about promoting yesterday’s blog post. One of his suggested ways to promote yesterday’s post – do a follow-up post – made me think of something that has bugged me for a long, long time. Why should we care about technical communication? In some cases, the phrase reads What is technical communication? Oh, these questions don’t come from my head. They are questions I pick up from people I meet or articles I read or topics I encounter on discussion lists. Those of us in the field of technical communication know that it is constantly changing and expanding and moving in new directions. Those outside the field – well, do they even know what the field is and what it entails? Blog posts that list…
Comments closedThat’s easy to answer. Ben Minson from Gryphon Mountain has a tidy list of the seven reasons your company needs a technical communicator. End Users Need Documentation Technical Communicators Look at the Product with a User Perspective Technical Communicators Help with Quality Assurance Having Quality Documentation Reflects Positively on Your Organization Documentation Provides a Record Documentation Saves on Support Costs Technical Writers Have a Versatile Skill Set He added four more reasons after posting the first seven. Technical Communicators’ Information Gathering Gets the Team to Think Critically Technical Communicators Are Specifically Trained Technical Communicators Lighten the Load Technical Communicators Can Provide Training and Support These are Ben’s 11 reasons in brief. Read the articles to learn the story behind each link. I like Ben’s reasons, but I wanted to test whether I could add my own – brief – interpretation to his reasons. End Users Need Documentation – Our work…
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