Tech Writers Unravel Tangled Web Specialists Weave
When he talks about technical writers, Don K. Pierstorff can barely contain his enthusiasm. And most listeners walk away from a session with the English instructor at Orange Coast College convinced that no modern business establishment that does anything even remotely technical can get along without a writer of its own.
A former technical writer--”technical communicator” is the preferred term within the profession--Pierstorff describes the job as a form of writing that does “everything that journalists and fiction writers don’t do. All of our writing is done to cause an action. . . . Someone, sometime, will act on what technical writers write.”
When Pierstorff first entered the field, in 1960, it was, he said, “the first time I ever knew that people paid people to write things that weren’t fiction or journalism.”
The field can be lucrative, with the median salary for professionals in Orange County standing at more than $30,000 a year. And so far, Pierstorff said, it is far from overcrowded.
Pierstorff drifted into technical writing when he was asked by a now-defunct trucking firm in Los Angeles to clarify its overly complicated employee’s manual.
“I didn’t write the manual (but) I put it into English,” he said.
And that, simply, is the tech writer’s job: to get through the tangle of esoteric terms and ideas used by specialists in a given field and to rearrange them into terms that laymen can understand.
The directions included with a bottle of nasal spray, the owner’s manual for a new car, instructions for personal computer programs, oral reports given at trade shows--all are put together by technical writers.
According to Pierstorff, people are no longer just drifting into the field, as he did, or being reassigned to the role from other positions within a company, as has been the case for many others.
More and more these days, he said, people are actively seeking careers as technical writers, and the Orange County chapter of the 11,000-member international Society for Technical Communication provides a forum through which students and professionals can meet.
Pierstorff, who retired from professional technical writing several years ago, is still heavily involved in the field. He even continues to refer to technical writers in the collective we .
In addition to teaching the college’s three technical writing courses, he also serves as adviser to the recently formed student chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. An offshoot of the Orange County professional chapter, the student club is, to Pierstorff’s knowledge, the first in the nation to be formed at a community college.
It is still in the embryonic stage, according to student chapter president Leslie Mitchell, a computer graphics student at OCC. But the club is growing rapidly--since August, when it was started, membership has increased from about five to 33 people.
The club’s main function--one it apparently performs quite well--is to help its members find jobs.
“We have what amounts to a job placement bureau within the society,” Pierstorff said. “Everyone in the program who’s wanted a technical writing job has gotten one.” Of the 33 members of the 10-month-old student chapter, approximately 50% have been placed in technical writing jobs, he says.
Judy Smart, coordinator of the job column in the Orange County technical writers’ 10-issue-a-year newsletter, names AST Research Inc., Fluor Corp., McDonnell Douglas and Hughes Aircraft as some of the companies that have listed their openings in the publication.
“They (the companies) usually contact us because someone in their company is a member of STC,” she says.
Pierstorff said he has seen as many as 20 openings listed in a single issue.
“Technical writers are coming into their own as professionals. . . . It really is a growing field,” he said. And as more companies are started and new technologies are born, he believes, there will be a growing need for individuals who can explain the jargon to the company’s employees and customers.
