Thursday, July 3, 2008
Balance
In reading the other blogs and scanning my own in the past few days I've realized something: I have taken a very different approach to the "reflective" aspect of the internship. My job is very serious and fast paced and because of that I tend to juggle several projects at once, some of them (like the popular WSR are ongoing and occur on a regular basis). I could post on here everyday with an update of what I have been doing. Sometimes it would be an update of a project, others expressing frustrations, successes or even the failures of a document I have been working on. I find I have been writing much more casually because I work in a professional setting and deal with very technical documents-many of which I am still trying to learn the basics of in order to understand context. Learning to balance your own life and a work life can be difficult and I do not want to lose my own voice in the midst of software development, biometrics and the GWOT.
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3 comments:
Sounds like things can get pretty complicated where you are. Is the technical writing aspect the most difficult aspect for you? We juggle a lot of different things, but I am glad nothing is technical writing here. I am getting a little tired of editing. We edit and re-edit, and edit again later. It is full time work, but fortunately we don't have to be in the office everyday! Good luck with the rest of your internship.
I like your approach to the blog in terms of using it as a space for writing more freely than you are able to do within your job. What I like best about your blog entries thus far are your efforts to define the different types of documents that you're helping to produce (these definitions will be useful in your final portfolio), as well as your descriptions and analysis of the problems in communicating across disciplines in your workplace. (By "across disciplines" here, I mean your position as a technical writer & editor vis-a-vis the engineers who use writing within their jobs--and who don't seem to use it effectively or consistently, either!). I'd love to hear you say more about the actually communication that you do with the "original" authors of the texts; you give us a glimpse of it in this and previous posts, but what exactly do you say as you make arguments for a specific change? Are you following company precedent here as far as the technical writers & editors go? Are you following principles you learned in ENGL 302?
So funny you mention that...the discussion between an editor and an author, it can be quite awkward at times. Discussions regarding comments from the customer to the author *and* the tech writer/editor can get even more fuzzy; those can become awfully heated. I can certainly discuss that one!
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