Looking Back:
Technical Writing in the Bay Area

By T. R. Girill

I first joined STC in 1976 and began technical writing in the Bay Area two years later. The East Bay Chapter's 40th anniversary thus affords a welcome chance to look back on what has and has not changed about local technical writing.

Personal Changes

On the personal scale, the changes in a technical writer's work life since the late 1970s are dramatic. Copyediting a paper draft with red pencil for a compositor was standard practice then; I was among the first in my department to use newly invented Wang word processors to edit drafts online. Instead of bragging about software tools, technical writers touted their genre expertise: some specialized in proposals or presentations, while others stressed the design of a good journal article. And NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena had just begun circulating its (formerly internal) layered approach to publication revision, the widely copied "levels of edit" model (GPO, 1980).

Even in the late 1970s, however, the best technical writers recognized the intellectual kinship of their work with the psychological insights of instructional designers. But the idea that a technical publication's effectiveness involved global (whole-document), not just local (sentence-level), features was just beginning to shape practice.

Professional Changes

On the professional scale, technical writing in the late 1970s began a growth phase that has yet to end. At that time, one STC chapter in San Francisco served mostly business writers, and another in San Jose focused on writers of computer documentation. A third single chapter, Pacifica, serviced the entire area from Fremont through Oakland and Berkeley north to Napa and east to Livermore. Now three chapters cover that territory, plus another in Sacramento.

Most employers of technical writers in the East Bay during the 1980s were large engineering or "research and development" firms or government agencies, which explains the prevalence of science writing jobs. Only later did many software companies and biotech firms migrate northward to create employment opportunities in documentation and medical writing. The balance has now tipped so far toward documentation that science writers have had to create their own STC special-interest committee to be able to find each other at national STC meetings.

One notable side effect of this change in professional emphasis, both locally and nationally, concerns access to information. Indexing, taxonomy, and accessible Web design issues are now common topics at STC events. But when I joined STC they were largely ignored.

Things That Never Change

Now that I am introducing high-school students to technical writing through the chapter's community outreach project, I am reminded again of the underlying communication principles that have not changed over the last four decades. Despite our altered software tools, job titles, and employers, technical writers are still primarily audience advocates, and usability still requires threefold attention to ease of understanding, ease of access, and reader (or user) relevance. Tangible confirmation of this occurred recently when Bay Area author F. J. Bethke's pioneering triple analysis of usability (IBM Systems Journal, 1981) reappeared as a reprint with retrospective commentary in the September 1991 issue of ACM's Journal of Computer Documentation. It was then transformed into a book-length treatment, enriched with ample modern examples, in Developing Quality Technical Information by Bay Area author Gretchen Hargis (IBM, 1998).

A second enduring theme is that effective publications must still respond to the constraints of human nature. The threshold of short-term memory is still "the magic number seven plus or minus two" (George Miller). We still prefer spatial cues to help us find and use important relationships in text (Edward Tufte). And there is still no single perfect way to name or classify things for reliable retrieval without extensive aliasing (Thomas Landauer).

Third, the insights of Frederick Brooks Jr. (The Mythical Man-Month, a book that I wrongly avoided for years because of its strange title) are just as relevant now as they were when he first penned them. Rapid prototyping followed by generous amounts of usage monitoring, user feedback, and iterative design still enable the best publications. And writing the documentation before writing the software (as Brooks advises) is still a rewarding path to success if you ever have the chance to do it (as I have).

Finally, technical writing in four decades has taught me to appreciate the enduring truth of Margaret Mead's often-quoted remark: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

The Devil Mountain Views -- Jan/Feb 2002
(ebstc.org/newsletter/front.html)
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