FEATURE ARTICLE: The Long and
Sometimes Winding Road to a Writing Career

by Jim Korth, Member

Sometimes our career paths are not straight, nor are they always in an upward direction. After one career in finance and another in information technology, I was looking for work that would let me be creative while drawing on the experiences and knowledge I had gained in nearly thirty years of knocking around (and getting knocked around) the corporate world.

In so many different jobs I found myself informally in a position of communications liaison between different groups, either within my company or between my company and an outside organization. No matter my formal job title or responsibilities, everywhere I went, daily business problems arose from inaccurate or insufficient information about products, policies, procedures, and practices. In most instances, the parties responsible for the problem had not adequately considered what the other party needed or how the information should best be delivered.

My interest in Professional Writing…

I got interested in professional writing because I found myself having to do so much of it to make up for problems caused by documentation failures or communication that had been delivered poorly or not at all. When external customers learn to rely more on the rumor mill for product information than they do from the company selling the product, that becomes a problem. When marketing and outside sales people drop even the simplest product information question on to the technical support organization because the product group publishes only garbage, you have a serious issue.

While both situations above are fundamentally management problems, addressing problems like these in the heat of battle usually meant creatively locating, assembling, and transmitting the needed information, usually in a hurry and with minimal help. Most of the time, the needed information did exist, but it wasn’t in a condition that could be released. Finally locating a much-needed portion of internal-only chat dialogue between software developers about an obscure bug deep in the operating system kernel can be a huge relief after weeks of pain. But the even harder work may come afterward in editing, organizing, and communicating the information for external distribution.

While interviewing for a new position…

I was interviewing for several positions in 2007 and applied at a law firm for a technical position. In the final interview, I met with the senior partner. Just on a lark, I brought some writing samples with me, including the Neil Perlin article I wrote for “Technically Write” in September. I explained to the senior partner that while I didn’t know much about structured authoring or DITA, I had developed an ability to absorb information quickly to a level such that I understood it well enough that I could write about it. Detecting his curiosity, I expanded on my interest in writing and discussed my membership in the Society for Technical Communication.

The senior partner took the article, and several days later, he offered me a job writing patent applications. The job involves quickly getting an understanding of a novel technical idea and then writing about it at an abstract level so that the basic invention and its technical novelty can be understood by a variety of audiences including judges, jurors, patent examiners, and attorneys, sometimes years later. All those painful efforts getting people of one technical level to understand what people of a different technical level were trying to say had paid off.

What I’ve learned…

I have learned that technical communication is much more than technical writing. It involves listening, asking questions, searching for information, and learning to be resourceful and creative in putting it all together. When it comes time to doing the writing, the hard work is over. Once I have the material in front of me and I understand it and know what needs to be communicated to whom, the writing part comes naturally.