Post #2 Interview with someone in my profession
I am a mechanical engineering major and I interviewed my supervisor at KEMET who is also a mechanical engineer.
He defines technical writing as “an attempt to capture a process, a technology, or a detail and pass it on to other technical people. For this to work, one must assume basis knowledge.”
He thinks communication is very important in this field, but most important is knowing how to communicate with certain people in the most efficient way. This could mean instead of showing a chart that people have to read, show just the graph; however, one must be careful when choosing what to show because the writer must take into account an audience. This was the main point that he stressed to me. An engineer or upper level management can read and understand complicated things like probability charts and differential equations, but the floor workers may not. So, if one was to show a floor worker some statistics, the technical writer must take into account what the floor worker will understand and take care when proposing his plan. For this reason, he said that about 25% of his day is technical writing, the hardest part being to put it in a format for the audience you are presenting or showing it to.
He also said that statistics are very important for this field to understand much of how the plant works, especially with the Six Sigma Program. This is a program that is comprised mostly of statistics and helps to reduce waste and defects. Having a creative hobby is a very helpful tool to help utilize your brain. This helps you be creative and think of things in your workplace that you never would have thought of before. This also helps relieve stress.
He graduated from Georgia Tech, so I asked him how much they prepared him for technical writing. He thinks that GT prepared him much more for talking to a technical audience than the average Joe. This is because in the classroom, everyone has the same basis knowledge, which is a technical level. Thus, he was used to talking and writing to his professors and fellow engineers than anyone else.
He defines technical writing as “an attempt to capture a process, a technology, or a detail and pass it on to other technical people. For this to work, one must assume basis knowledge.”
He thinks communication is very important in this field, but most important is knowing how to communicate with certain people in the most efficient way. This could mean instead of showing a chart that people have to read, show just the graph; however, one must be careful when choosing what to show because the writer must take into account an audience. This was the main point that he stressed to me. An engineer or upper level management can read and understand complicated things like probability charts and differential equations, but the floor workers may not. So, if one was to show a floor worker some statistics, the technical writer must take into account what the floor worker will understand and take care when proposing his plan. For this reason, he said that about 25% of his day is technical writing, the hardest part being to put it in a format for the audience you are presenting or showing it to.
He also said that statistics are very important for this field to understand much of how the plant works, especially with the Six Sigma Program. This is a program that is comprised mostly of statistics and helps to reduce waste and defects. Having a creative hobby is a very helpful tool to help utilize your brain. This helps you be creative and think of things in your workplace that you never would have thought of before. This also helps relieve stress.
He graduated from Georgia Tech, so I asked him how much they prepared him for technical writing. He thinks that GT prepared him much more for talking to a technical audience than the average Joe. This is because in the classroom, everyone has the same basis knowledge, which is a technical level. Thus, he was used to talking and writing to his professors and fellow engineers than anyone else.
posted by David Floyd at 5/24/2008 08:26:00 AM
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