Two posts for the mere viewing pleasure of one!
Or something.
So how hard can technical writing be? Seriously? I'm not talking an article on, say, "Learning Lua by Friday' or anything. I'm talking articles on, say, airplanes, engines, pizza ovens, etc etc.
I took an editing test for an editor job.
Now, I want to be confident. Edit? Ha. I can edit in my sleep. I can, too. I find it very relaxing. I can find my zen when editing. However, I have edited resumes, game fiction, design documents, and articles, oh so many articles, about Air Force stuff, from simple 'news' and 'feature' stories to 'The Definition of Airpower' and 'Night Vision Technology' etc etc.
But editing isn't that simple. I don't know how good an editor I am compared to the gazillions of other editors out there that probably applied to this job. And, in fact, I totally destroyed the article I was meant to edit, so I cut it down by about...um. Half. Maybe a bit more. Because that's what I do. But, it was journalistic editing. "This is EXTRA. Words take up SPACE. Be gone, Evil Excessive Wording." So I may have edited it a tad too much. Also, I'm not from a tech background. For all I know, I edited out the ENTIRE point of the article. I don't think I did. But I may have.
Then there was the proofreading test. Which is semi-bogus. I mean, WHAT editor or writer now- a-days doesn't employ, oh, spell check? But there were other things to proofread. I had a nightmare I left half the errors in, and missed GAZILLIONS of simple errors.
So, I am fretty.
I may be an idiot. Only I won't know for sure if I am until later this week/early next week. I don't know what I'll do if I discover that I did an exceptionally poor job of editing and that I'm an idiot. It's rather stressful.
And I'm not even including the pre-stress I'm having about whether or not I'll even get an interview at this place.
See, Fretting, for me, it's something I do well.
Stay tuned, to find out if I'm an idiot or not!
2 comments:
Tech editing is a good and fairly common way to get into the tech writing field.
Tech writing itself isn't hard. Ideally, you need to be able to write, although I've worked with exceptions. And you need to be able to learn/pick up/understand the software or hardware involved. What does create a barrier into the field, though, is the common requirement that you be familiar with specific authoring software -- often Word (ack!) but also, in this area, FrameMaker (what God would use if he existed and were a tech writer). And sometimes other stuff, such as Visio or Dreamweaver.
I have Visio, it's really easy from what I understand. I just haven't had the opportunity to use it.
Not sure about Dreamweaver, my husband has a book around here somewhere on it... ha ha.
Is FrameMaker hard? Usually, it's not the software, it's the price, that makes it hard for me to learn.
Is FrameMaker publishing, or similar to Word?
And isn't it strange that the way to become a writer is to first be an editor?
It boggles the mind.
Post a Comment