by Judith Harper

When (or if) you tell somebody that you’re a technical writer, do their eyes glaze over? Do they look at you quizzically and say, “So, what does that mean? Do you actually write ’Click here and press Enter’ all day long? What do you actually do?”

You can answer questions like that by articulating what STC Executive Director Susan Burton calls “your powerful story” about technical communication.

Believe it or not, you do have a powerful story. Your past and present professional activities have made and continue to make a difference. Your communication skills improve your company’s bottom line. Your manuals make the company’s products easier to use. Your safety guidelines save lives. Your procedures keep company officers out of jail. You have an impact.

Making a Difference

We all have stories. Here’s one:

To help us fix a not-very-good website, [this writer] came up with a website that is well organized, comprehensive and easy to use… much better. It can now be used by customers to research and understand the service offering AND it can used as an online “manual” for our service personnel. This site is the best example of this type of technical documentation resource that I’ve ever seen.

The story behind the story? Hours spent trying to:

• Unravel the convoluted workflow procedures that were kinda sorta in place
• Locate authoritative versions of forms and approval documents that had to be completed and filed
• Find answers to the unanswered questions that came up every time a customer tried to work with the service, and
• Organize all the customer-required information online in a clean, uncluttered, easily accessible format.

Having Unanticipated Consequences

At the STC-NEO (Northeast Ohio) regional conference held in Cleveland last month, Susan told a story of unanticipated consequences–a story about a 23-year-old beggar  whom she met on a trip to Africa. He regularly stationed himself on a rolling stool–his legs were useless as the result of a childhood bout with polio–on the street outside her hotel.

After striking up conversations with this young man, Susan discovered that his disabilities had not prevented him from finishing high school with the help of a sponsor and enrolling in college. He had  become a self-taught computer-literate student and soon-to-be college graduate. How? Simple. Contrary to popular wisdom, he DID read computer manuals and thereby opened previously closed doors. Technical communication enables people to improve themselves and the quaity of their lives.

What's Your Story?

So what do I do? … in thirty seconds or less, I verify and streamline company procedures to make sure that employees can execute them and customers can understand them.

What about you? What are your powerful stories? Dredge them up, distill them into a paragraph or two, and send them to newsletter@stc-swo.org. We'll publish them; they’re bound to be fascinating.