 Officially now, welcome to the panel on Linguists in Technical Communication. I'm Sue Lindner, your moderator, and Marcus Robinson is our Zoom producer, and he will help me keep an eye on the chat as well as providing links to useful resources in the chat. Well, in Jenny Reddish's presentation a few weeks ago, I learned all about the bite, snack, and meal approach to introducing topics. So I thought I'd introduce this session by giving a bite about technical communication, and our panel will expand it into a meal. So it turns out that the bite is quite a mouthful. Our professional organization, which is the Society for Technical Communication, or STC, devotes a full page to top-level descriptions of jobs in the field. And I have a link to that, but if somebody else could find it, it's stc.org about STC and defining technical communication. But here's my bite. Basically, for me, technical communication is the art of developing an information interface to a technical or specialized product or topic. And my snack would be that technical communication involves expressing relevant information clearly and developing it in efficient and accessible ways, typically to people who need to learn to do something correctly, efficiently, and even safely. Happily enough, this translates into a wide variety of jobs that linguists are well suited for, such as writing, editing, training, localization, and even some overlap into web design, user experience design, and more. So with us today are panelists who have linguistics backgrounds and who have established careers in one or more job areas of technical communication. So Kate Dehere is a technical writing lead. You can wave at us. A technical writing lead at Salesforce. And in this job, she has developed writing standards and guidelines that are used by over 200 technical writers. She holds a patent for a system to organize and manage user interface text. And as I just found out, she writes great error messages. So, and then Madeleine Adkins has a bachelor's and a master's degree in linguistics. And she has worked in technical communications, leadership planning, teaching, and instructional design. She's also done training and consulting for Japanese and United States U.S. businesses in the area of intercultural communication. So there she is. Yay. And then Joe Devney has been a technical writer since the mid-90s, mostly writing about software. In 2008, he earned a master's degree in sociolinguistics at Georgetown University and since then has considered both technical writing and linguistics as his careers. So, and then just about me, I'm a, I actually am a linguistics PhD and I turned tech writer about 39 years ago. I have been writing doc, I have written documentation mostly for software developers and database products and mostly for Silicon Valley startup companies and I am newly retired. So, on with the meal. So I think the first, first off, I'd like each of you to tell us about your journey into technical communication. And I'm wondering if we could start with Madeleine. How did you get there? Where did you start? And how did you get there? Mine was an interesting journey and perhaps not typical. Right after college, I moved to Japan and I started teaching English and a friend of mine who was leaving about a year after I got to Japan, essentially handed me a job doing technical writing or more like editing for Matsushita, which is a big conglomerate in Japan and we know here mostly is Panasonic, but this was their kitchen appliance division and I worked mostly on rice cookers and toaster ovens. And I got to work on the first bread machine. Yeah, so that was really cool. So that was just an amazing coincidence that I got that opportunity and I liked it, but I kind of filed that away because the career I went into when I got back to the States was intercultural communication training and at some point the company I was working for started to downsize and was sort of heading towards disappearing and I realized if I didn't want to hang my shingle out, I had to move in a different direction and I basically realized a good career move was technical communication. I'd grown up in a family of writers and editors and people who obsessed about grammar and words and so in addition to my linguistics, I knew I had a strong writing background and felt confident making that switch and I got my first full-time job by going to an STC meeting and I think it was my second STC meeting and I met a recruiter and he basically created that job for me because he found out that I had knowledge of French and Japanese and he knew a company that would benefit from that and so I ended up getting hired by the Division of Sony that makes PlayStation and that so my first full-time job was actually working on the PlayStation 1 updating those documents for the user manuals and then working on PlayStation 2 a little bit and then what do I want to say after that? It was really key for me, obviously, the networking. I had a backup plan which was at STC. I met somebody and I was going to work with them on some things and they gave me some pointers and I was going to work on developing my portfolio and this chance meeting with this recruiter kind of accelerated it but it was through networking that I really got into the field. And what kind of linguistics experience did you have at that point when you started out? So I had my bachelor's and linguistics and obviously at that point I had teaching experience under my belt. I hadn't, I probably done a couple freelance things, but I hadn't really worked as a writer but again I had an unusual background. My father was a copy editor and so I had more than the average amount of training and good writing so I had that and the linguistics for me I knew that trained my brain to be logical and that's really one of the keys with the tech writing is being logical. Absolutely, cool. Joe, how about you? How did you get there, get here from there? Into technical writing. Back when I was young, back about college age, I took some training in data processing which was programming and a lot of other stuff. Never got very much of a job in IT. I was a computer's tape librarian which shows you how long ago that was. But then several years later at about the same time I graduated from college and got laid off from my corporate job so I looked for a new career because I thought it was time to do that. The way I got, I decided that technical writing would be a good fit for me because in college I had done an awful lot of writing and my teachers liked my writing and I had the technical domain knowledge to bring to the field so I won't go into detail about how I found my first job because you can't do it anymore. It involves newspapers and postal letters but yeah I got a job writing system administrator manuals for a subsidiary area of the phone company. And then you kind of added linguistics later, is that? Yes, I had a little bit of linguistics background before that. I've been obsessed with language in my whole life. I've read a lot of books about language. In my college days I had, I took a couple of linguistics classes, classes as part of my minor in communication arts but then I had been a tech writer for about 10 years and I decided I wasn't really doing anything new and exciting so I decided I needed some new, some more credentials and I started looking around for master's degree programs and I found one at Georgetown that sounded very interesting and I realized that if I worked really hard I could get through it quickly and get back to work so I took a year sabbatical and got my degree. Very cool. Great, thank you. And Kate, how about you? What was your Odyssey like? I was a French language major so I took linguistics and translation courses as part of that. My father was from the Netherlands and nobody speaks Dutch so Dutch people have to learn different languages. My father was good at languages and I was always encouraged to study various ones so I ended up majoring in French and then I didn't have any special idea what I was going to do except that everyone assumed that I was going to be a teacher and I knew I didn't want to be a teacher and some people would say oh well you could be a flight attendant and I would just say that I didn't like wearing polyester and so then a friend of mine I just sort of wandered into this internship in the Publications Department of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and that introduced me to publishing and I made a contact there with somebody at Random House had a little office in San Francisco where they did foreign language and biology college textbooks and so I ended up getting my first real job there and worked there for five years and that was a really great background for everything else that I did, all the technical writing that I did later. I used that background still to this day and from my linguistics coursework I got kind of a very structured mathematical sort of notions of language so you've got if you think of languages and equation where you have vocabulary and syntax on one side of the equal sign meaning on the other that sort of way of thinking has been really helpful to me and I think also the structure in implied in linguistics also has been really helpful to me in developing technical documentation and I have found that not all technical writers have that ability to really understand structure and so that's something that my linguistics background has been has really helped me with. You know I in when I graduated from college or even when I left that my first job I could not have imagined the internet but the internet's been really good to me and I think you know to everyone here and so I have worked on a lot of websites and for various software companies and now as you said I work at Salesforce and most of my job there is writing user interface text which again that sort of mathematical approach to language has been really useful for that very constrained writing context. Yeah I often feel like I constructed sentences I didn't just kind of you know author them I actually kind of put them together so they said what they needed to say it is a very structured mathematical kind of approach and also just being able to draw pictures of software again it's that structure you linguist think in terms of tree structures or networks you know representing information in that way is pretty natural to us. So my journey was I actually finished a doctorate had a postdoc and then realized I needed to support myself and there were no jobs available so I went to the career planning and placement office on campus which did a lot of what this LCL program the career management track you know looking at resumes understanding your skill set becoming conscious and aware of your skill set and mapping them on to the skill set that your target career needed and learning how to talk about that learning all about informational interviewing that was a new concept and they even set us up with some interviews and giving us lots of good guidance for how to how to how to repackage ourselves as non-academics and but like everybody else I sort of had that side interest mine was publications I had edited yearbooks and and some other kinds of journals so I'd always liked presenting written information and it turns out that that plus the linguistics was a real helpful thing and so I became a software writer for 40 years so good so I thought maybe it would be fun if we could tell talk about maybe a project or two that show what it's like to work to do the kind of work you do Joe start with you do you sure the easiest job I've done a lot of different things along the way the easiest one to explain for this audience I think is having a regular corporate job as a technical writer in a software development department which I did for a few years for Vodafone that's the big cell phone company based in Europe they have an office not too far from where I live this was for technical audiences as the new software that what the product I was working on was called Vodafone Live it was like like the very beginning it's so you get a multiple application it would have to be administered in data centers around the world the different Vodafone offices in different countries and that was my audience it was technical and also many of them did not have English as their first or sometimes even second language so I had to keep that in mind when I was writing so my cultural communication classes help there yeah how did you learn about your audience I mean if they were very technical and you were somewhat technical but perhaps not in their area of technical expertise you don't have to actually know how to do your audience's job you just have to understand like the environment they work in what sorts of things they work with I knew the concepts I know what a data center is I know about passing data and installing applications so I could not go do their job but I could explain those aspects of their job that our software helped them do okay yeah thank you yeah and so what I delivered was system administrator guides and application administrator guides pretty technical stuff my subject matter experts were the software developers who were building the product so did you work primarily with the those engineers or software developers or did you work with other writers or editors I there it was a two person technical writing shop so me and one other writer I have only had one job where there was a separate team of editors to what I wrote and I thought that was wonderful it wasn't it wonderful I had one of those jobs too I adored it yeah but mostly I had been a writer slash editor for my whole career yeah same here good all right cool um Madeline I'll mention more than two but very briefly just to get because I've done a lot of different things so the first one I want to mention is McKesson I worked on a project one of the things that I did was to document the processes inside a distribution center as they were changing the technology they used there and that was very hard because all of the SMEs all of the SMEs subject matter experts yes the people you get your information from yeah so all those people were working at the distribution center setting things up and they were working 12-hour days and they were very tired and they were not reading their emails in the answering them so I ended up flying out there for five weeks to Memphis and then it was really easy to document so I could catch people during a lull and I could see things for myself and I could get help from other people than the people that were officially assigned to to help me because that's actually one of the big challenges and that's why I'm mentioning it with with technical communication you are often having to work around other people's schedules and other people's kind of demanding situations to get the information so in my case going there was the key in recent years I've had two contracts at Apple the first one was a content migration project so moving content from one old website to a new one but it wasn't it's not just moving it we had to update the content we had to validate it we had to make sure it was current so there was actually a lot of rewriting and that actually meant just a lot of one-on-ones with the experts with the SMEs and just creating a bunch of new content and so that's an example of a situation where I knew you know I know some HTML I can I can set up a website so you know you needed those skills to do that as well as really good energy skills the second one at Apple was developing a new hire training program for which this was listed as a tech comms role but it really really was was very much in my daily wick of also being a trainer and you know curriculum developer so anyway developing a new hire training program for some big data new hires and the thing about that was again there were a lot of different experts and in that case I often worked with them to document or I took their documentation or the soft skills I created it based on knowledge I had so that that's a different kind of role then the recently I've gotten into UX writing and content strategy and that's where I'm at right now and so I've worked with two banks and the first one was was Chase where I was working on the it's called the uh oh I'm gonna blank on the name ah it's written down let me look at my note um it's working on a uh you don't care anyway so first one was a little more one on one it was a little more like what I think of is typical tech writing and the second one uh where I'm working now at Wells Fargo they I'm working on website content so we work with teams and we work with a lot of different people so it's important to be aware of what kinds of jobs and this is I think more typical of UX writing and content strategy is is working with a lot of people and having to have a high level of kind of meeting skills and dealing with personalities and you know all those interesting things that are not technical but are key success it's what is what is content strategy as opposed to say technical writing I I'm actually not clear on the concept it's funny because there's different people in in the business world who use the term differently so apparently that term is also used in marketing so it's content strategy and marketing very different focus from like what I'm doing which is you know making things accessible on the website so that customers and potential customers have ease of use uh you know helping you to do what you need to do with your bank right so um that's different and then within UX writing kind of the UX if you have a role that's called UX writer you're probably focused day to day more on the writing more on the word to word sentence to sentence level and if your content strategist you might be doing that but you also or you may exclusively be doing the big picture holistic view of what content needs to go where and it's a little more like infamy information architecture and so it's a little more leadership or advanced role cool thank you and Kate what kind of projects so have um really kind of typify your your career well let's see I'll um writing your messages I'll do yeah writing your messages yes um but to get so I'll start with I have a few and starting with um my first actual tech writing project was a couple about three years after I had left Random House I had a different sort of job in between and then I got this gig writing a step by step guide to wiring classrooms for the internet for a project called net day across the state of California um and uh you know I didn't know anything so I learned a lot of things that's one of the things I love about technical writing is you learn about all kinds of weird stuff that you would never know about otherwise so um I'm the only French major I know who can wire category five cable um so um so I so the way I did that was they they provided uh you know people who knew what they were doing and I had interviews they gave me a photographer as well and they had I had interviews with um someone who installs cable for a living and that's what I learned that part of my job was um sorting and prioritizing I the the was a woman actually who her father had been an electrician and now she does electrician stuff but does internet stuff and and installations and I said well she had been going over some facts and I said well which thing is more important and she looked at me and said it's all important yeah so as a writer you know that you can't say it all at once and you know people using your stuff can't absorb it all at once so you have to learn to sort and prioritize and you you you you're a lot of your job as a technical communicator is is just learning to ask questions and sift through what you get back and and figure out how to you know how to organize it so um that was sort of how I got my start in tech writing and then people started asking me oh we're you know are you computer scientists you know so um yeah and then I I had several I worked for into it in adobe in uh in the late 90s worked for a whole bunch of different startups that don't exist anymore and professional associations and so on and some of the content was um was technical and some of it wasn't it was for you know I did I did things for educational nonprofits and education nonprofits and that wasn't that that material wasn't technical but the ability to kind of gather information and think about it in this new context social context of well websites and the internet um and and then put it together for ordinary people who were not in the technology business that was that was you know a big part of what I was doing and then continues to be at Salesforce because most Salesforce users are not technical they're salespeople or or shop owners or you know um that's the whole idea is to provide something that's easy for people to use even if they're not technical so and at Salesforce I I work on I have worked on a huge range of stuff and I mentioned um my publishing background before and so I I'm I like Madeleine have found that background really useful and so I've created a whole that a series of guidelines and standard standards for other writers to use that the writing group has grown tremendously since I joined Salesforce and I work on you know I've written standards for user interface text and for various kinds of documentation in particular we when Salesforce went to Ditto which stands for Darwin it doesn't matter what it stands for but it's a structured way of creating technical documentation and and when Salesforce adopted Ditto somewhat as a standard um we had to writers had not previously written uh what's called a short description a short desk which is part of what you need it to make didn't work and uh so suddenly we were all supposed to start including this element in our documentation and release notes and I I thought oh my gosh people are just going to put whatever in that between those tags we have to have some guidelines so another writer and I developed a release note specific guidelines um that are you know still in use now that it's all about making the release notes work not sort of one topic at a time but um the way the short descriptions and the titles are written help each topic become you know work in the the bigger system that that Ditto is and explain at every level what is new each release at Salesforce so that's that's been a that was a yeah key accomplishment um yeah so your audience there were sort of in-house writers essentially right learning how to and you were helping them do their job which is I I guess I had a project where I wrote a template for a functional specification for our engineers to use because these engineers well our software developers would be inventing new features to add to our product and very often they just would have an idea and they'd just start coding nothing wrong with prototyping but they'd get to this place where there would be mission creep it would start doing different things than they expected it to do and or more or less etc so we decided to have a functional specification where they could actually sort of prototype on paper and describe what it is they were going to add to the product and who was going to use it and why would they care and I you know just made all of those different kinds of they had to address each one of those points before um and then it would get approved by the the um the marketing people and the and well all all the stakeholders the engineering group qa customer support um you know did we really think this was a good feature and uh was it well thought out did it skip any steps you know that was another fun thing is reading reading something for consistency consistency and completeness which I think linguists can do very well and you'd say oh you've told me how to you know edit this thing and delete it but and turn it around rename it but how do you create it no oh well I guess we should tell them that so it was a good but any rate the writing for for the in-house audience can be just as important it helps people get their facts straight um internally so well so you've all kind of touched on these things actually had you finished you were going to talk about several projects I think you did um yeah no I I had I I hold a patent on um it's a nice thing but we're getting sales which is very they pay for patent applications and so I hold a patent on organizing and managing user interface text so I think you all touched on this but maybe we can talk a little more about ways in which your linguistics background has helped you get your job done um you know what are your or put another way what what jobs or tasks have really benefited from your linguistic superpowers so I don't know somebody jump in Joe um okay yeah um I think what has helped me specifically from linguistics is um syntax learning syntax and uh semantics and I something I did not study formally but I've read a lot about is psycholinguistics which is how the the brain actually interprets language and produces it and that's really helped by editing a lot uh because you know basic copy editing is just fixing the grammatical errors and things like that but what I'm doing now is more just not just untangling sentences but I can explain in detail why this version that you had is harder for the reader to understand and how the new version is easier for reader to understand because there are two important things that technical writing specifically has to have what you write has to be um um you have the reader has to understand it has to be accurate they can't misread it and I think something else because that can lead to user error you come on that and also it has to be absorbed quickly the people need to find out what they need to learn what to do and go back to their job you don't want um they don't want to read a whole page if they can get back get something done in half a page so they're busy people they're busy people and our job or my SME's job is built around the software we're building um for the the audience for the uh people who are reading the book no the the software is just a tool to do they're helping do their regular job so the my job is to get the information into the brains quickly and accurately and so that's where I go I like your point about the cycle linguistics or that the processing speed that people take information in I used to think of myself as feeding them a rope gently you don't want to like dump the whole rope on top of them you want them you know to get just a little bit at a time to uh so they can kind of ingest it and ingest it you're you're coming up with the explanatory strategy for how this information can be learned by somebody and um you kind of have to start what do I start with first and then how do I pace the uh yes what do they need to know to do the next step and actually there I have an analogy from my work at Vodafone where the um there was limited bandwidth for getting uh data out to the people's phones and so the engineers had to work on uh had to design things to minimize server that phone to stop doing what it's doing go back to the server get some new information so it's sort of the same thing in um in my technical right I'm trying to make efficiency like that the more tens of milliseconds you can save in cognitive activity the better sounds good um Madeleine how about you what what linguistic superpowers do you bring to your job that have helped you and your users I want to give an example but first I just want to second or third what you all just said because like right now especially in in uh UX writing and content strategy one of my jobs is literally to represent the customer what the potential customer and look at their interests because that's not what every you know not everybody's thinking carefully about that and so the designer and I are really the ones who are speaking up for that um right well you're looking at the product from the outside in and not instead of the inside out so that's um yeah because there's always you know like there's competing um products out there competing companies so we got to make our product appealing and easy to use friendly um so the example I want to give those from when I was at Sony working on the PlayStation and uh when the when we started working on PlayStation 2 there was a naming conventions project because you have to name all the buttons and things on the console itself they have to have names and this was one things were very new like like we had to have some very original names for things so that had to be translated into all the languages of all the manuals and to cover all the countries of the world and I forget if it was like 26 or 36 it was a lot of languages and uh so I was in charge of this project and we used a company that did the translations and I studied a lot of languages that always helps if you have that background but of course I don't know 26 or 36 languages uh so here I was receiving the translations on these part names and I remember and this is absolutely my linguistics training because you're trained how to look for patterns you know how to recognize a pattern and you know how to recognize when a pattern is not happening so what I noticed was there was mistakes in the Arabic which I really don't speak I don't even know the writing system and Swedish which I don't speak and I was able to say uh we have a problem there are translation errors in the Arabic and the Swedish and I have to say at first people didn't believe me but I did get my point across that there was a problem and when it was researched yes there was a problem and we had to get a whole new translation for those languages and so I couldn't have done that if I hadn't had my linguistics training or I I wouldn't say I couldn't have I think my linguistics training provided me with an excellent background to achieve that yeah being able to look at paradigms and you know understand aha here's the regularities and whoa what's going on with that and maybe it is irregular but probably it's not and it's always worth questioning I think I think we yeah I've certainly experienced that as well great example cool um and Kate how about you well I really yeah plus one about pattern matching right and generalization um you know especially in a in a multimedia environment I think that the structure inherent in in linguistics um you know I just agree with Madeline it just gives you uh really helps you perceive problems in in language and I that's a fascinating example Madeline I I know many times I have uh looked at a sentence and looked looked at something and and I knew there was a maybe I knew next to nothing about the subject matter but I could tell from the language that something something was wrong because you know linguistically um and you know a number of times I've you know pointed out you know sometimes sometimes if you point out mistakes people think that you're just being their older sister or their high school English teacher or something and they but but you know plenty of times people have looked and said oh that's a terrible mistake I mean not language-wise but content-wise I'm so glad you caught that I didn't catch I only caught their mistake because it showed up as a structural problem in their language it's and it it's it's weird it's almost like a a right brain non-language thing to see those patterns and and identify them um but um yeah that's a really interesting part of my job and just seeing if there's anything else and then oh just the whole thing about the whole ability to to get to precision in in language and and precision the precision you can achieve and convey meaning you know when you have a linguistics background right it's just really important and I I think it's only going to get more important uh you know in in the future um you know working with different technologies um well certainly being able to disambiguate sentences you know where you you have a sentence that could you often get sentences from say engineers that can mean multiple things or you get them from other writers even in bad documentation and and the reviewers can will read whatever they think is reality into those sentences so they don't necessarily notice it I would rather write something that was clear and unambiguous and wrong because then that will get caught by the reviewer but if it's kind of you know we used to call it lizard dancing it was just kind of like oh it's kind of looks like this and uh you know people can just kind of project into it whatever they want to see it's a big roar shot test you know documentation is a roar shot test they can read into it whatever they think the truth is but it doesn't but then the poor reader you know user kind of looks at this then goes what are they trying to tell me yeah that's a that's a thing that I have thought against you know and going back to my mathematical notions about language if you have vocabulary and syntax you know language is an meaning is an equation you've got vocabular vocabulary and syntax on one side of the equal sign the meaning on the other you can't just declare the meaning it on the other side it's a point of the vocabulary and syntax um so that's kind of what I mean about precision and can mean yeah yeah well the fun part too is that you're you're actually kind of it's I used to characterize my job as being a very high level language or high high level programmer in a language called English and and I had a different compiler for every reader that was reading my document and you know if they could all kind of come to consensus about what conceptual model I was conveying then I had done my job but if everybody sort of had a different idea of what was going on then it was time to do a revision so or three or four so well um any other good superpowers that linguists offer shall we move on to are there any other tech career uh tech communication career opportunities that we haven't talked about yet and that seem fairly well suited to linguistics definitely the you know the area of voice and I think you've had a whole panel on that but I mean definitely the whole voice area offers a lot of opportunity to a linguist especially if they're either data oriented or conversation oriented there's a lot you could do that way and that's kind of you can see it as an offsuit of tech comms for sure um and I think one thing to sort of get into the next topic maybe but I think it's really important for each of you to think about like what are the skills I bring other than linguistics and often as as the case with my Japanese and French that got me that first full-time gig often it's the the combination of skills you have that get you there that give you the job right right um do you what kinds of things have you folks had to learn on the job sounds like quite a few things cables and Vodafone and uh yeah Joe um I I usually I I try to keep up with technology I know uh I read about a lot a lot about science what I learned on the job is the specifics for that particular company that particular product so I talked about Vodafone and I learned there and elsewhere about what's involved in getting cell phones to work things like that um it's just I try not to start at zero when I started a new job so I know the I know the basics of whatever they're working on to some level and sit down and with especially if I sit down pretending it or building it uh I will learn specifics about that job that particular product how it's different from others on the market or what came before yeah what kind of tools do you guys use and did you have to learn about those on the job or go off and take courses or you know what would our what would our our linguists career linguists here need to go do I've used a lot of Microsoft word I have to say yes and cell and numbers and pages and so like for me it's been a lot of the really basic business tools but you know it really depends on the job and it depends on what sort of a perfect culture yeah I had to use oh go ahead Joe yeah yeah uh I use whatever my employer or my client is using and yes a lot of times that does mean Microsoft word and sometimes I would tell uh tell people you know you want a very complex document here word is not really the tool and you want to switch to a publishing platform like Adobe Framemaker and they say no everybody knows word when I keep that so I've learned a lot about how word works just because I've had to but I did have to take take a class to understand to get started with Adobe Framemaker Framemaker seems to be fading now and it's being replaced by a madcap flair and maybe one or two others out there so those are the tools that I use the most often I guess I've used um I I adored my years using Framemaker I think it it is such a sane package but I agree it's it's been kind of fading out for reasons I don't quite understand maybe cost but yeah flair seems to be taking its place um Dreamweaver I guess I don't know if that's still happening but for HTML authoring it's only on subscription now uh-huh but if your if your job involves making websites you should really know Dreamweaver yes and I've also used Markdown I guess for um Mark Markdown is fairly new at least I haven't heard about except for the last year or so but it's super easy there's not much to it um so you can learn that in an hour or two and then say yes I'm qualified to do Markdown in the UX world you have to know or you know I'm being expert but you have to get comfortable with things like sketch or I think a figma um envision those kinds of tools which designers you know um designers develop their images in and share them so you have to know a little bit at least get comfortable with using their tools well at Salesforce um I my experience was similar to to what Joe and Madeline have described when I was uh consulting um at Salesforce we have pretty different we it's been a really different thing we have a lot of in-house tools some of them are bespoke that we use we have um we use something called Perforce for checking documentation checking and document into the code we use oxygen um um we uh use a lot of um Google I haven't used word in a long time only the legal department seems to use word itself for so we use a lot of Google docs and Google spreadsheets which makes it possible to collaborate with other people other writers and other people on things I I don't know what I don't know how we would operate without that people being able to just go in and and work on a document and not be thinking about version management and what version is is saved where and so on so we do a lot of our drafting and finalization of things and in applications like that and then of course there's Salesforce um which is huge and no one knows how to use it all but depending on which features I'm working I've worked on various features during my nine years there with you know different teams developing different parts of it and so um you know I have to I have to use it at least to some degree to do documentation um and it's just sort of a um it's a constant learning process how does this feature work how does that feature work why is why am I not able to do this oh because this other setting so um there's a lot of troubleshooting and just figuring things out um that we have to do in-house um I mean there is you know some support but yeah it's not not just down to sort of simple simple tools and then I'm going to put something in the chat here it's my one of my favorite quotes by a Zen Abbott who is also a writer I mean also a yeah he's a poet and he's a Zen Abbott here in the Bay Area and it's quoted in Wired Magazine he says the real technology behind all of our other technologies is language and I just like that because that's it's so true it's you know there's all this all these other tools come and go and you know but you as a writer know the basic things that you want to do and okay this this year I'll use this tool and you know for the next client I'll use this other tool but you you know as a writer you know the kinds of things that you wanted that you want to do nice yeah I want to jump in with one other comment about Microsoft Word um for these people who the attendees who want to move into technical writing if you're going to consider yourself a professional tech writer you need to know more about word than just how it's like a typewriter you have to understand how to use paragraph tags and character tags things like that or paragraph style excuse me um because that's how you get that's how you format the document that's how you make it consistent with through that's how you can make changes more effortlessly than going through and fixing it helps you organize the document so uh learn all that stuff oh sorry don't want to end it now go ahead something else which in the last decade no matter where I go they've got some kind of CMS content management system oh yeah talk about that they were around before that but really it's just everywhere you go there's a CMS now it's often in my experience something like confluence but it can be other things they're not hard to learn but that's actually one of the challenges is they they hope you already know that that you don't need to spend a lot of time learning that basically a content management system exists to manage the various versions of the various pieces of documentation and code for that matter right I mean so you can put together combinations of the correct versions of things that's that certainly originally when I used them like stony that that was the objective but now it's like everything's on the CMS that that's kind of the file box that right well I shouldn't say that because there are other ways to but but it can happen that that becomes also the general file box or information source about different groups and projects and stuff so learning the CMS and learning it quickly it's really important so does anybody out there have any questions please put them in the chat or raise a hand or be thinking about them we're kind of coming toward the close of things probably my last question of the panelists is what advice would you have for linguists who are perhaps thinking about a job in technical communication what kinds of things should they how should they prepare themselves build their portfolio so use stc resources anything that seems useful okay yeah I'll jump in stc is a good resource and what I would recommend is find the closest stc chapter and go to their meetings okay because typically at an stc meeting my chapter has them once a month there's always a guest speaker talking about some aspect of technical communication so you'll learn something that way and you also get a chance to talk to a network with them learn from veterans in the field who can tell you what tools you need what what companies you might want to talk to about jobs where you can pick up new skills we for the last year or so of course everything's been on zoom where you miss a lot of that but I hope everything goes back to in person because that's that's a much richer experience so I mentioned that certainly building up a network is essential that's how I got my first job I had prepared like crazy but then what really made the difference was running into an old college pal and who said oh you know the last job I worked at the tech writer there is is hiring so why don't you you know submit an application um so I think you know set stc chapters are a great way to build your network as well so and I think in the previous um in in Kate's workshop that a question came up about job paths is that remember this topic oh sure yeah I'll go next yeah I absolutely want to agree that networking and making personal connections is key I'll tell you one reason for that obviously in my case it literally got me a job right away but but even when it doesn't do that if you're applying for something and with the internet you know maybe a thousand or five thousand people are applying for that same job if you know somebody in that company you know somebody who's a friend of somebody in that company through your network you can get your resume on the right person's desk and that's how you get hired a lot of times because very true many resumes coming in yeah so it's I can't say enough for personal connection so build that um I don't I may have missed it but did you mention like volunteer at stc or volunteer at some other organization that way you can for example and that was again my plan before I got that offer at Sony but you know if if you volunteer I think I did it anyway but you know if you volunteer at stc or I guess write the docs or whatever organization then you have the opportunity to make closer connections to people you can have something that's for your portfolio and you have these people who can be your like recommenders right reference some companies want references right they'll ask for references and so do something for free just to build up your portfolio or help out a startup that can pay you either nothing or very little or whatever you know don't don't be picky about your first job because that's not don't worry about that's not your end game it doesn't matter just get some experience that will help you build your career especially if you're right out of school um and I also want to say um it's really important to be really generally kind of open-minded and and saying yes to opportunity because you don't know where it's going to lead so just really always be learning always be exploring new things in the Bay Area I can't speak for every city but you know before COVID there were like after work lectures in the city and sometimes in Oakland just for um you know you could learn new aspects of the field or some other field so not only is that a networking opportunity but you know you're just a technical writer is somebody who's always learning you have to learn whatever you're writing about so keep working on those skills and keep developing your expertise and the other thing I want to say is that tech writing jobs are not always called tech writer so you have it's really hard in a sense to look for work because if you just look at jobs that say tech writer tech editor that's going to be a percentage of the jobs that are really that so as I said that you know the UX subfield has its own titles UX writer content strategist or content designer is kind of what it's moving to but but in tech writing in general you can often come under a whole lot of names and the other thing I'll really say is get your resume in shape get somebody to review it who knows the field and LinkedIn is almost everything nowadays and as far as contract work people I'm you know I'm established but people are reaching out to me really have your LinkedIn profile solid and that will help you get jobs I echo what Madeline says about flexibility be curious and open and flexible don't say no say thank you because you you may think that somebody's idea or suggestion no way but you just you don't you're learning you don't know so just really be open and flexible and that's what you that's you need to be flexible in these jobs too um there's uh there's yeah and that's the key requirement at Salesforce I think is is to be able to do different things and turn on a dime when the companies um or the department's priorities change um you know and and that's it's a good thing really you know many companies get stuck and are dysfunctional or you know or just are don't they you know turning them is like turning an oil tanker and so they can't respond well to changes in the market if you work for a company that does respond well to changes in the market without there being complete chaos there there is no point um there's a middle ground um you you you want to work in a company like that because it's it's good it's good for your job it's it's good for the product it's good for the people who you know the customers for the company to be responsive in that way so think of that as as a good thing and then um I was going to mention there there's an organization called write the docs which I don't know much about I know it's popular with some of the other tech writers in Salesforce so and it's at write the docs.org and um and then the other thing I want to say is do informational interviews you know apply your you know meet as Madeline said go volunteer um you know go to sdc meetings find find tech find people in the field and and ask them you know for informational interviews ask if you can spend 15 20 minutes half an hour asking them questions and most people are really happy to share what they know and if they like you and there are openings at their company they will be happy to recommend you yeah if you're still in school and in college you might be able to contact a writing professor and see if they can help plug you into internships I mean I certainly hired several interns through the the writing professor at Santa Clara so and they went on to become professional writers technical writers after that so and they started out by doing sort of there's always a a layer of of activity tasks that have to that are you know you don't need a lot of expertise to do but it gets your feet wet and I've hired several people to do production work just basically you know converting a bunch of files from one software formatting package to another um and they started out by doing that on a temporary basis and then pretty soon got to know the product a bit better and then was in a position to be hired so um so starting in even at kind of low level repetitive tasks can kind of get you get your foot in the door I want to add a couple things got informational interviews because I want to second that that's the third that that's a great thing to do some people don't understand informational interviews as a concept so I think it's important to be clear that if you ask somebody for an informational interview often they will say yes they're very generous in that way but two things one it's it's good etiquette to thank them afterwards that will make a good impression and two in the interview and right after like don't ask for a job don't say is there a job in the company that's not what an informational interview is it's to talk about the field and talk about that person's expertise and they're doing your favor don't put pressure on them by it's it's considered bad form if you ask about jobs in that interview so they may as Kate said they may think of you later and go oh you know and there are some openings so you know they might bring it up but don't ask directly because that's not the point of the informational interview I'm and I want to echo about internships that that's just such an important way to get experience and find out whether you're interested in a field and Salesforce has Salesforce uses a lot of interns and a lot of those interns end up you know coming on staff our internships generally advertised or how do you find them I always kind of found them as I say by going through say a professor so I don't I'm not sure how how would you just go out and find an internship yeah that's a good question I I know that Salesforce reaches Salesforce targets certain universities like Carnegie Mellon has a technical writing program so we get a lot of interns from there and certain other places so yeah definitely talk to your your counselor well any other questions comments yes I would like to before we go I want to recommend two books that this audience might be interested in the first one is the first book about technical writing that I read when I entered the field it's a good basic explanation of how technical writing is different from other writing what you should do and that's how to communicate technical information by Jonathan Price and the second author is Corman with the KF forget where his first name is but that's one of them and there is a forensic linguist named Roger shy SHU why he has a book called fighting over words and he tells the stories of a number of cases he's worked on as an expert witness and several of them are involved things like owner's manuals and warning labels the sorts of things that technical writers produce and he has thorough linguistic analysis of those things and why they work or why they don't so those are the good two good perspectives on the field great thank you yeah I forgot to ask about your your your linguistic forensic forensic linguistics branch of your career there that I just I just gave a one-hour talk about forensic linguistics that will be on youtube sometimes oh good yeah good good I'll let you know about when it happens thank you Nancy do you have any questions or comments here to add I might I always ask the same question in these sessions how do you evaluate your own work or does somebody evaluate it for you how do you know what's effective from my point of view I think that depends on the size of the company and whether they actually have resources to do any kind of evaluation one company I worked for actually we did put out a survey of the various users I mean we were a small company and there weren't very users at that customers at that point but we did kind of change our our direction of what what manuals we decided to put resources into based on what they they wanted but sadly in terms of actually you know doing usability studies of the actual document that did not happen anybody else have you guys participated in anything like that I've been in situations where we do a v testing peer review editors as part of the team kpi's which is a business metric to evaluate the effectiveness of something in the market there's a lot of different ways it can be evaluated yeah we certainly did reviews when there were more than one of us in the department I'm sorry go ahead okay well for documentation you can track page views but we look so that's one metric that doesn't really it doesn't tell you why people looked at a page whether it was a you know a good thing or a bad thing or right everybody could have been saying can you believe what the writers said right right everybody and so there's big traffic to this one that's right yeah not very clearly collect if you can collect unquantitative if you can collect qualitative data from users on your documentation that's you know that's really helpful and important and you know looking at it regularly and and you know and incorporating that feedback into your content strategy you know and we yeah analytics any analytics that you can apply to your to your documentation and to your you know you can instrument your user interface as well and see you know how people are moving through your user interface right and then you can identify patterns there too I was just going to mention two more qualitative methods that I've been involved with I when I was at sun we used to do usability testing on sections not whole manuals because that was too much but on newly revised sections so you get a few people in one at a time you show them the stuff you ask them you know uh the questions or you ask them the questions how do you look up how do you know if you've got the syntax right for such and such a format and they they go in the documentation the way they knew wait a minute you reorganize things where is it now oh oh now I found it this makes much more sense or this is a crazy place to put it you know that kind of thing and then another case we actually did remote usability unmoderated have you have you been involved in any of this stuff with user testing or user I've I've been involved with that and that that's a really interesting process because you can get some qualitative and some quantitative yeah I like I like to do the in-person qualitative right now that's not a good option right I love to do in-person and even I love to do one-on-one full-hour sessions but that sometimes is not economical so I recall when I was at financial engines this is maybe eight or nine years ago where we had a little animation that was going to let you can't see my fingers a short animation that was going to last about 30 seconds or one minute I can't remember anyway really short and so we put it out to an animation house gave them the script we told them what we wanted there are certain rules about you can't represent money with a dollar sign or a coin because of the financial implications so you're not allowed to do any of that but you can represent money as a bag or you can represent money in some other abstract ways and so we the question was for the end users who were likely the target audience for the animation which was going to be on a web page but this you know if they chose to run the animation it was like a little one-minute film and so we said what was the message you got of this right and we stopped it at different points and said what did this image represent to you what did this you know mean for you and then at the end asked them to you know which of the summaries retold the story the best so you know with a very brief time 15 minutes contact with an individual you can do a lot of things that will reveal to you where in your message things are weak and they need to be more clarified or you know they don't hang together or whatever so I want to encourage our audience here also to recognize that there are both quantitative and qualitative ways to measure your work and you've named about 16 of them and I'm offering two more yeah sadly though I think that very small companies tend not to devote their resources to doing that even though it's you know would be so useful and yeah it's arguable it would leverage their scarce resources you know so that you're spending money on things that really reach the your users and have an impact on the experience right exactly yeah all right I'm happy are you happy yeah and I think our audience is happy people who had to leave a little early said thank you so that was nice and go forth and be wonderful for the rest of the day and all the rest of your lives