________________________________ Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 14:26:23 +0000 From: Stephen O'Brien <[email protected]> To: "Frame Users (framers at lists.frameusers.com)" ??? <framers at lists.frameusers.com> Subject: Engineers as authors Message-ID: ??? <a5dc5afdd2de45499d86573fe295a2cd at BLUPR04MB499.namprd04.prod.outlook.com> ??? Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Hi, A few mechanical engineers have been asked, as part of their varied workload, to author certain documents in English (How To, Webinars, software essentials) in the near future. Working with authors who are not formally trained is a new experience for me. I am wondering how to best define their tasks and the tasks of my technical writing group who will work together to ensure quality documents. For example: ?? ? ? ? I could provide the engineers with templates in FrameMaker and an introduction to the basics of technical writing and English grammar and bring them to write good documents over time. Some formal training in technical writing could be offered. The technical writers would then review the final documents (container and content) to ensure the overall quality of the documents. ?? ? ? ? Or, maybe the role of the engineers should be to write rough content within guidelines (get the ideas and workflows on paper), and my team of technical writers could be responsible for formatting the content and expressing their ideas/workflows correctly in English. This would take much less time for the engineer (less of a learning curve). Do you have some experience in this matter? Any hints for what may work best? Many thanks. Here in Quebec City, Canada autumn is in full color. Mother Nature at her very best. Stephen O'BRIEN Coordonnateur ? la documentation et r?dacteur technique senior | Documentation Coordinator and Senior Technical Writer InnovMetric Logiciels | Software sobrien at innovmetric.com<mailto:sobrien at innovmetric.com> T (1) 418.688.2061 F (1) 418.688.3001 Stephen, engineers as authors, bad idea. I worked for about 20 years as a technical documentation consultant for the companies mostly doing business with the U.S. military. We would take the engineers notebooks, and any other write ups we could get, then do the circuit analysis and write the mil-spec technical manuals. On the other hand, we didn't need language translators, only did translation from engineeringize to standard English. Ha. It simply wasn't feasible to teach the engineers tech writing to specs. They had to design the stuff, we had to translate it into theory of operation, and maintenance. That was why we got the big bucks. -- Keith Smyth President Smyth Consulting ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "I?ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."? Maya Angelou ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Technical Documentation Consultant > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.frameusers.com/pipermail/framers/attachments/20131007/82f39eef/attachment.html>
