Common Skills in Documentation Positions

As I finish my responsibilities as an intern, I do not feel that I am master of manual documentation, but I feel that I have learned a lot, even if I have primarily learned what not to do. After looking at job postings for positions that focus specifically on manual writing, maintenance, and updating, I admit I feel a bit more confident in my ability to adapt in to a cooperate environment because of my experiences. I’d like to spend some time discussing the requirements that seem common to these types of positions, to comment on the corporate world’s relation to academia, and to share some resources that I have found helpful.

While a lot of job listings appear to have prerequisites that are somewhat vague and common on job descriptions, such as having strong communication skills and attention to detail, there are some very specific prerequisites that appear. Two that stand out on several listings is that the applicant should have the ability to handle several projects simultaneously and to create instructional material with only a brief time to actually learn the program being documented. These requirements represent an attitude that exists within the corporate world – bosses do not like to hear ‘no’ for an answer (Soplinsky 112). While I was fortunate that my boss allowed me to spend the entire semester working on a manual, that was primarily because I was figuring out the program before anyone else within the department. In this specific situation, as long as I was assisting the administrative staff in using the program, I could take as much time as I wanted.  But then I was free help. In an employment situation, technical writers creating documentation are required to create that documentation quickly, possibly while simultaneously creating or modifying other documentation.

There is also a specific emphasis in these listings on being able to write for a wide variety of audiences. Often, corporations have grown from simply producing technology to selling information (Johnson-Eilola 579), and while that information may be distributed in a variety of ways, it all must be designed in a way that makes it user-friendly to a wide variety of demographics. In order to do this, technical writers must study writing mechanics and style to find techniques that make writing approachable to the widest audience possible. In some ways this adds to the requirement for strong communication skills. Specifically, future employees will need to listen to the way people communicate and interpret language in order to fit in to a corporate environment (Southard 85), and in the same way they must expressive sensitivity to how others may interpret communication in written instruction.

Other requirements seemed to be subordinate to or derived from these two basic foundations: working quickly and communicating effectively. So, to learn these skills, TPW students must practice and learn.

For multitasking and working quickly, personal practice works best. As I stated, my experience as an intern taught me a lot about what not to do while preparing documentation. Perhaps I do not know the best practices yet, but I have an idea of what works, and especially what doesn’t work, during planning and writing.

For communication skills, I find that there are a variety of resources out there. For style, the Microsoft Manual of Style works nicely, and because of Microsoft’s place in the technological world, the manual will give readers a familiarity with documentation for a variety of software. To help perfect form, Edmond Weiss’s The Elements of International Style provides not only rules for writing for a variety of international audiences but also discusses rules that commonly come up in discussing user-friendly mechanics, such as comma usage and active/passive voice sentence structure.

Finally, I find that Doc-To-Help YouTube series gives a lot of helpful information for beginner technical writers, especially in this video, titled “Approaching the Blank Page”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVlFeN2Bh_Y

Works Cited

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. “Relocating the Value of Work: Technical Communication in a Post-Industrial Age.”

Soplinsky, Emily. “Survival Skills for Communicators within Organizations.”

Southard, Sherry G. “Interacting Successfully in Corporate Culture.” 

The Context of the Workplace

As an intern at Missouri Southern State University’s Student Success Center, I had the primary responsibility of creating a user manual for Tutortrac, a program recently purchased to help catalogue various facets of the center’s tutoring program. Like some internships, I never had an official job title (aside from “intern,” of course) because I was working in the department to perform an unconventional job, and my position would be unnecessary after my work was done.

Because I was designing a manual for a specific group of people, I had to understand how that group communicates and what their expectations are for the program. In the case of Tutortrac, many of its features were irrelevant to the Student Success Center’s goals, so part of the manual’s goals was to subordinate those features to the features that actually pertain to those goals. Because of this, I had to be able to interact with the administrative staff to learn how they think, how they communicate, and what they value in order to sculpt the manual to be user friendly. In a way, I was learning how to shape my writing to a specific audience, which was probably the most important skill for my internship.

What I did not do was follow the module in most academic communities. Typically, academic settings have students learning certain disciplines and then illustrate their knowledge in writing. In most humanistic programs, such as the English programs I had come from, the writing could take on any voice that the student writer wanted. Like many interns, I had to relearn the relationship between writing and its context, specifically because the environment had changed to one where my original expectations (that who I was writing for would know more about my subject than I did) we disappointed by the reality that I had to become the master of my own subject, and if I didn’t know about the subject (Anson & Forsberg 207-208), the student success center would only learn about it when the manual stopped working for them.

In some ways, I was not prepared for the freedom’s this position gave me. I expected to work on public relations and signage as part of my position, but I never really did much design work. Instead, when I was given jobs that related to something other than the manual, I would usually be working as an editor. I found that I entered the department with a level of prestige that came from my history as an English major because it gave me a level of rhetorical expertise (Katz 437). In a classroom setting for most English majors, this power dynamic is foreign because of the sense of equality that exists within English classes – while some students may be better than others, there is an awareness that most students are on the same or a similar level of expertise. The English classroom does not prepare students for the writing and editing I did as an intern because it only gives students the context of an English classroom and not the context of a department that has writing needs with only a limited number of members formally trained in writing (Driskill 59).

Though my appointment at the Student Success Center was for a position that would not really exist once the work was done, I appreciate the opportunity to have my expectations dismissed. While the classroom can give the student access to information that can be used in a variety of contexts (59), the opportunity to intern in limited positions that have no name, and that perhaps did not exist before the intern, provide an opportunity to work in a different environment and context, allowing the intern’s skills to be shaped in ways the classroom simply cannot.

Works Cited

Anson, Chrisand Lee Forsberg. “Moving Beyond the Academic Community: Transitional Stages in Professional Writing”

Driskill, Linda. “Understanding the Writing Contexts in Organizations”

Katz, Susan. “A Newcomer Gains Power: An Analysis of the Role of Rhetorical Expertise”

Instructional Manuals in TPW

Instructional Manuals in TPW

My primary job at Missouri Southern State University’s Student Success Center was drafting a technical manual for a tutoring program they had recently purchased. There was a reason why this task was given to me, and why it has taken so much time and energy: no one could figure the program out.  The program is not especially user-friendly, so the administration within the Student Success Center needed a document that would help them perform the specific tasks they needed to perform with the program, so I had to learn the program, understand the needs of its users, and then understand the condition that the manual would be used in so that I could understand how to approach the manual.

Of course, genres are formed by their conditions of use (Rhetorical Genre 79). I designed my manuals specifically for administration within the Student Success Center, an audience that is fairly limited and consistent. Even within the context of the Student Success Center, I would have to have made different decisions if the manual had been for the center’s tutors and tutees, since those audiences are broader and could conceivably change from semester to semester. Administration must meet certain prerequisites and all work within the same environment, and when you get to know that environment you get an idea of what liberties you can take in writing the manual, but when you do not know your audience so well, you have to reconsider how to go about writing the document.

The context the instruction manual exists in always influences the writing process (“Genre Research” 147). I found that the manual worked within my internship as a dialogue – the administration would ask me specific questions about the program, and I would write a section that answered that question. In turn, when trying to decide what functions to write about for the manual, I would speak with one or more of the administrative staff to understand how they want to use the program so I could better shape the document to answer the questions they might have. This also allowed me to understand the tone and vocabulary the administration staff use to communicate with each other, and allowed me to develop a vocabulary for the manual that would best fit the environment it would be used in. Anytime I was uncertain about how a section was written, I could have one of the administration attempt to perform the steps listed and see firsthand what worked and did not work for specific members of my audience. While it could be frustrating to constantly receive feedback for sections that were more difficult, that feedback made the manual a group project, a symbol that the entire office was working together to make sure they could each use the program.

I had a real luxury having the audience that I had because they worked next door to me. Often, I didn’t have to worry about what topics to cover in the manual because I could listen to specific questions they had. I used the term ‘dialogue’ to explain how the manual worked at the Student Success Center, but for larger audiences manuals work as monologues, since writers do not have the ability to speak with their audience. Because of this lack of interaction with the audience, it’s easy for the manual’s usability to suffer because of the subject matter’s complexity (Miller 162).  Because of this, instructional manuals that act as monologues have a different approach to content and voice. Writers must cover a wide array of topics to ensure that users of various skill levels can use the manual, and a neutral and consistent vocabulary must be developed for the manual to ensure that the largest number of users would be able to understand the manual. These manuals must undergo usability testing more often because writers are not working so closely with their audience, and the test subjects’ ability or inability to use the manuals become the only type of input the audience really gets.

Works Cited

Bawarshi, Anis and Mary Jo Reiff. “Genre Research in Workplace and Professional Contexts.”

---. “Rhetorical Genre Studies.”

Miller, Carolyn. “Genre as Social Action.”

From Schoolroom to Workroom

I have been interning as a freelance editor for the City of Cherokee. During that time I worked on one major project, which was to digitize the City Code book and edit for typos. I also added in amendments, applied styles to all of the text, and then reformatted it into an additional pocket sized book.

For this project I needed knowledge of editing, Microsoft Word, and a basic working knowledge of legalese. This was my first opportunity to apply styles to an entire document to make it easier for an aging population, and editing a document written in legalese. I had dealt with legal documents in previous jobs, but I never actually edited them before. I was limited in the wording I could change due to the legality, but getting to work with it was new.

            Working from home I was able to set my own time frame and goals. I was basically digitizing and applying styles to the entire document, so there wasn’t a lot of writing. I worked under the city clerk and he reported to the council and mayor the changes that I made. The clerk was friendly and open to the changes I made stylistically when I went to talk to him. There was some tension in the office when an employee was terminated, reminding me it was nice to not be in an office environment.

If I hadn’t already completed the code book I would have passed on the style sheet to my successor. I would make sure they knew that language needed to remain the same, and I would let them know about the town itself by way of explaining some of the stylistic choices that were made.

Genres in Technical / Professional Writing

The primary elements of technical / professional writing genre used during my internship are that of a City Code book. A City Code book is organized in a manner that is conducive to productivity for those using it. It is a professional item, that uses legalese to convey to all residents those rules that everyone in town must follow. Although the City Clerk and Mayor will be the primary users of this book, it is available for anyone to view, so it must be written in a way that all can understand.

This genre works in my specific professional context at my internship site because it gives the city's residents guidelines that they must follow. These guidelines assist in keeping the community orderly, and in the event that something is amiss, the City Clerk has something tangible to reference for enforcement issues. 



Other professional contexts in which this genre might be used would be code books for law enforcement and dress codes for school or work. This genre of technical / professional writing would vary based on codes being enforced, the size of the company or organization writing the code, and the audience that will be using them.