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Tom Johnson is a well-known technical writer who works for the LDS Church in Utah, USA. Tom has ranked #1 on MindTouch’s 2011 list of 400 Most Influential Technical Communicators.
QUESTION (1): How long you’ve been a technical writer? Where do you work right now? How would you characterize a typical day at work?
I’ve been a technical writer for about seven years. I currently work for the LDS Church in Utah. A typical day at work depends on what project I’m working on, but it might include updating help information on the wiki for LDS.org applications and working on content for the LDSTech blog. For more detail about my typical days, see this post or this one.
QUESTION (2): How did you become a technical writer? Did you start out as one or did you switch to it from something else? What was the reason?
I started out as an English teacher in Egypt, teaching writing to college students. I then worked as a copywriter for a time, but then switched to technical writing for better pay. I found out that I enjoyed technical writing more than I imagined. I enjoy the combination of writing and technology. I wrote about this with more detail in Becoming a Writer: Reflections on a Trip to Idaho.
QUESTION (3): What is the single most important change that you see in the technical communication sector since you first became a technical communicator?
When I first became a technical writer in 2005, my main deliverables were a how-to guide and an online help. I’ve since become more fond of quick reference guides, video tutorials, and wiki content.
I think as a whole, we’ve seen some changes in the industry, such as the increase of content management systems, the implementation of DITA, and the increased use of web platforms for help. But overall, I don’t think the tech comm field has been that full of innovation. Part of the problem is that technical writers are mainly writers, not tool creators, so our innovations may be less tool-dependent and more content-centric. Some tech comm professionals have piggybacked onto the innovation of the web, but documentation requirements around content re-use and translation don’t often find their way into web tools.
I wish I could point to something and say, oh, definitely structured authoring. Or definitely the use of videos. But at the end of the day, these are little branches from the main tree, not a huge shift in the whole field itself. Of course, I’m still young by comparison. You’d probably get a better response from someone who has been a technical writer since the 1970s, like Neil Perlin.
Still, the question intrigues me, so I will expand on what I think the greatest transformation in technical communication should be. The greatest transformation yet to come is to drop the single-author paradigm of technical writing and to embrace the way information flows on the web. Continued…
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