Reflection of my experience ENG 673 Fall 2010

This is a post to help me brainstorm ways to fulfill an ENG 673 assignment titled, "Reflect upon your experience this semester and your identity as a technical communicator."

I would say a year ago I probably did not know my place in technical communications. I started working as a technical writer in 1991 and am still employed as a technical writer today although a few years ago I started to feel the burnout and questioned whether I wanted to continue or take another path. I started looking at other career options including management, data warehousing, creative writing, and journalism. In the beginning, I set out to be a civil engineer, morphed over into chemistry, took some english classes, and reclaimed my love of writing in the spirit of technology as a technical writer.

But I got bored, or distracted, or lost along the way. While researching graduate studies in creative writing, I looked back at my alma mater, MNSU and discovered the Technical Communications graduate studies courses. One caught my attention - Visual Technical Communication. I had become interested in data graphics and the display of technical information in many visual forms including graphs and charts and so this seemed like the class for me.

As an experienced technical writer and graphic artist in Information Technology with a special interest in end-user authored content, my place in this industry is to help others step back and take a good long look at all the 'stuff' that's published and how it might be managed. More specifically, wikis have been around long enough for some type of content management to be applied to them by now but wiki cms is basically unheard of.

Today, my company uses a corporate wiki to push content out to users but also allows a set of those users to author their own content through an approval system. We still don't have all of this figured out and I'm afraid we'll end up with a stockpile of gobbledygook without a way to manage it. I think if we apply some type of cms or web cms to the wiki while it is in its early stages of adoption, we'll come out with a more searchable, usable, maintainable, efficient end-user authored system.