Saturday, May 13, 2006

QOTD "On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does." Will Rogers.  [Quotes of the Day] Ain't it a shame? 8:13:05 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

How ill-informed are we? We being the technical communication community, or at least those self-selecting readers of Scott Abel (The Content Wrangler) who participated in his recent survey on what technical writers read. Results here, but only for a few more days. . . But what does it mean? What can it mean when barely a third of the respondents read the two STC publications, and virtually nothing else? When a majority admit to reading none of the other publications listed in the survey? Are we really that poorly informed? Or so insular that we think all we need to know is what we hear from other TC's on mailing lists? That we don't need to keep up with the technology that we'll be documenting tomorrow, or the trends that might make us irrelevant? This is scary, and very troubling . . . I'm not suprised that so many don't read blogs, not to mention don't know of any tech writing blogs and seldom find blogs useful in any case. There aren't many of us blogging, most of us who do go off topic far too often, and some simply stop (SmartTechWriting.com is hanging it up after only a few months) or run out of things to say. Even Scott's ready to move on to something new and different. Jenny hasn't said a word since February 15, the same day as Guy's last post. The rest of us wander off into non-sequiturs and ruminations about kittens and ice cream. . . Maybe Scott can shed some light on the survey methodology or demographics of the respondents that might illuminate the results. I'm hoping this is just an anomaly, but I'm afraid it isn't. I have worked with far too many technical communicators for whom technical writing is just a job, not a career, not something to work at. They're the ones who will be left behind, the commodity writers. It won't be pretty. 7:50:27 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

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