The Red Pen |
Article Rating: Above Average
(# of votes: 4) |
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| Author:
| Halley
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| Submitted: |
22-Jul-2007 22:24:14 |
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| Welcome to "The Red Pen", a new feature here at the CyberArmy Library. As I see it, CyberArmy is a community that we as members make and are responsible for sustaining through progress and growth of our own devising. This column is going to be my way of communicating with the rest of you in the community. You will of course be seeing my personal opinions here, but my purpose is to spur discussion, motivation, or action, through that most ubiquitous of editorial tools, the rightfully feared and oft-maligned red pen.
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For my first column, I would like to talk a little bit about the Library, although tangentially. The CyberArmy Library has a lot of content in it, but it is sustained only by the contributions of we the members. Therefore, for us to have content, people have to write.
However, I find that many people see no value in writing (or editing for that matter), because "we are a technical community and need programmers, not writers". I find this a very interesting point of view, because clearly, there is no doubt that people, especially technical people (regardless of field), read! White papers, conference papers, tutorials, instruction manuals, programming books...the list is endless.
So where, pray tell, do these things come from? Are they spontaneously generated by the act of programming itself? Is there a hidden community of manuals living under a mountain somewhere, where they receive notice of new products and send out one of their own to fill the space they left in the box or on the CD for the instructions? I hope you answered "no" to the above; all those things are written by engineers, programmers, and technical writers.
Many of the luminaries of computer science have become such because they disseminated their work by writing. Would C have become as popular as it did if Kernighan and Ritchie had not written The C Programming Language? Would we be playing with cryptography as easily as we do today if it were not for Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography? Would we have so many networking gurus if it were not for the plethora of TCP/IP books available? The progress of science is built on the transmission of information, and information is transmitted by writing.
If that is a bit too abstract and speculative, let's get practical. Would you like to make the same amount of money in your field without the hassles of R&D? Well, if you know your field, and you can write, you can be a technical writer. When people want to know how to use your company's product, they will be looking to your work for guidance. The usability of the product is directly related to the readability of the instructions for it. If someone cannot figure out how to use something, they are not going to buy it. If a product does not sell, companies lose money, and people lose jobs. So, while it is not readily apparent, writing is one of the cornerstones of product marketing.
Even your average professional author makes money from writing. What you read on the page, however, might not have been exactly what the author wrote, which is where the often overlapping jobs of copyediting and proofreading come in. Proofreading limits itself to ensuring formatting consistency and correcting typographical errors. Copyediting, on the other hand, also concerns itself with the overall readability of a document, which means material gets changed, moved, or deleted in order to improve the consistency of the piece.
The reason that you the reader needs to know this brings us right back to the beginning of this column. CyberArmy Library, just like CyberArmy as a whole, lives or dies based on the activities, ideas, and motivations of the members here. Many people do not see the value in writing; I've shown you various ways in which writing is essential to not only technology, but can be of fundamental importance to us as individuals. Conversely, a lot of people may not know how to write, and the fact is that what comes out on the page in its final form may not be exactly what went in in the first place; there is a support network behind the writer that helps the writer be as good as they can be.
If you see no value in writing, maybe I have succeeded in at least getting you to re-evaluate your position. If you think you are a bad writer, maybe I have convinced you that you might be pleasantly surprised if you try. That is the operative word: in order for any endeavor here at CA to succeed, we have to try, and maybe we just might learn something along the way.
This article was originally published in the CyberArmy Library on July 23, 2007. The original can be found here.
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