#technical writer

Dude, just admit you don't actually know what the fuck I do and hand the job requirements over to someone who does.

"Degree requirements: engineering"

Bitch, you do NOT want engineers writing anything. That's why you hire my 'just one more question' ass. What the fuck.

This happens every time I job search. So many people think that the tech writer must know how to do all the things the experts do, but that's literally not the point of the job. The point of the job is that I come in stupid as a brick and bother the experts until I understand how their shit works. And then I write that in plain language for all the other people who AREN'T engineers or coders or whatever the fuck expertise you think I need to have.

My expertise is writing, grammar, audience analysis, and being able to write for that person who is so mad they kicked the box and yelled at customer service.

One thing I love about the Linguistics Jobs interview series is that each interview has relevant information about a specific job, but also lots of wonderful general advice about looking for work. Today, I really appreciate Alex Katz’s insight into the importance of building up a portfolio of work that you can share with potential future employers. Trying your hand at technical writing, or audio production or any other job you think you might be interested in, is a great way to see if it suits, and have something to show potential future employers. You can follow Alex on Twitter (@WizardOfDocs) and they’re also on Mastodon ([email protected]).

What did you study at university?

For my bachelor's I did a double linguistics and Chinese literature major, and an honors thesis about how characters in old Doctor Who stories address each other. Then I did a Master of Arts degree in linguistics, focusing on pragmatics, and my thesis took John Searle's speech act theory and Brown & Levinson's politeness theory and combined them into a new set of speech act categories. The idea for my master's thesis came from reading Searle's original paper in my discourse analysis class and thinking "I can do this better." So I wrote a paper about it for the class, and that turned into the first draft of my thesis. So don't prevent yourself from doing something if the only reason you want to do it is to do it better than someone else. It gets results.

What is your job?

I'm a contract technical writer for a shopping website. My day-to-day work is improving the documentation of how to use/add to the code that keeps the website running: I'm editing the existing documentation one page at a time, but I'm also taking edit requests and proposals for new pages, and even planning a major restructuring of my team's internal website to make sure our customers can learn what to do better.

How does your linguistics training help you in your job?

Studying linguistics, and especially pragmatics, has made me a better writer and a better editor. I can figure out why a particular phrasing or formatting decision is better or worse in context, and explain it to my teammates. That skill isn't just useful for the actual documentation--understanding pragmatics also helps me write emails and Slack messages to make sure members of my team are talking to each other and can give me the information I need.

Do you have any advice you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

If you want to get into technical writing, start building up your portfolio as soon as possible, especially in your chosen subject area. Ask your professors if they have syllabi or lab procedures that need updating. Start a blog. Document open-source projects. I didn't realize I wanted to be a technical writer until a couple of years after I graduated, and now all my best work is proprietary and I can't work on open source projects without jumping through lots of hoops. So I'm feeling kind of stuck. If I'd realized sooner that I could just (for example) send the developer of a Minecraft mod a pull request to improve their in-game tutorial book, my portfolio would look a lot better.

Also, expect to spend at least a few years as a contractor before any company decides you're worth hiring for real. That means a lot of short-term jobs, and probably some bad employers at the staffing agencies. But it's a good way to figure out what kind of company you really want to work for, and a great way to build up your resume--even if I don't get to go full-time at this job, I can now say I've worked at three different big tech companies.

Any other thoughts or comments?

It's not exaggerating to say studying linguistics has made me a better person. I was diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder in college, just as I was starting to study linguistics, and those things together gave me a wonderful opportunity to study how people talk to each other and learn how to present myself as someone people want to spend time with.

Related interviews:

Interview with a Standards Engineer

Interview with a Product Manager

Interview with an Editor and Copywriter

Recent interview:

Interview with a Stay-at-home Mom and Twitch Streamer

Interview with a Peer Review Program Manager

Interview with an Associate at the Children’s Center for Communication, Beverly School for the Deaf

Interview with a Metadata Specialist and Genealogist

Interview with a Developer Advocate

Last week, I discovered that my technical writing in the OCR domain crops up in a third book.

Karin Wagner, Professor of Art History at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), has made extensive use of my two web sites on OCR (“Optical Character Recognition”) in her book “From ASCII Art to Comic Sans”, published by the MIT Press (2023).

And when you explore the use of typefaces in popular culture, the story of con man/cheque forger Frank Abagnale – the subject of Steven Spielberg’s movie “Catch Me If You Can” – becomes unavoidable. His antics in turn bring you to MICR (“Magnetic Ink Character Recognition”) (https://spielberg-ocr.com/MICR.html) and the specialized banking fonts E13B, OCR-A and OCR-B.

Another example of popular culture: Data 70, a full alphabetic version of E13B, was used liberally to suggest computerization. It became the lettering on spaceships in many sci-fi series in the seventies. Sydney Pollack used it in the title sequence of “Three Days of the Condor”, a spy thriller with Robert Redford.

Equally true: Arnold Spielberg, father of, was involved in the development of MICR. And Ronald Reagan was part of its promotion. Yes, THAT Ronald Reagan!

Some 11 pages of Chapter 3, “Machine Readable Typefaces in Popular Culture and Beyond”, are directly based on my web sites “Spielberg, Abagnale and OCR” (https://spielberg-ocr.com) and "How OCR Works” (https://how-ocr-works.com).

Another academic volume published in 2014 tells Abagnale’s story from the point of view of criminal law. I only know about that book because I granted a Professor of the Washington College of Law the right to reuse some photos of Frank Abagnale.

The third book to describe my work is “The IRIS Book” (https://pygargue-international.com/the-iris-book-3) by Pierre De Muelenaere, the former founder-CEO-president of I.R.I.S., the Belgian OCR company where I operated as technical writer for 15+ years.