Engineers as authors

[Alison Craig]

In defense of some engineers, I've actually had one request that he be allowed to work in FrameMaker as that was the way all the engineers worked at his previous job.

Unfortunately, at the time, I was working at a company that used Word, not Frame, so I had to tell him no L

Alison

From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of John Sgammato
Sent: Monday, October 07, 2013 7:44 AM
To: Stephen O'Brien
Cc: Frame Users (framers at lists.frameusers.com)
Subject: Re: Engineers as authors

IMO you'll have more success and happier times if you take the latter route. They'll never need to know FrameMaker and may resent having to learn it.
OTOH showing them some of the principles of tech writing shows them that there is more to our profession than transcription and formatting. A lot of "Here's what needs to be done - you do this easy part and we'll take care of the rest" can simultaneously educate them and make them happy that they don't have to handle everything form planning through authoring and review to production and publication and archiving... and in the end you get more respect as they understand all the work you do to make their words look good.

On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 10:26 AM, Stephen O'Brien <sobrien at innovmetric.com<mailto:sobrien at innovmetric.com>> wrote:
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
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