Engineers as authors

[Stephen O'Brien]

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 à la documentation et rédacteur 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
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