Recently, the Society for Technical Communication (STC) has begun to solicit suggestions from its membership to reverse the decline that the board can no longer ignore. David Farbey took it a step further today, asking Does the STC deserve to survive? There is definitely a gulf between what the board hoped to hear from its members and what the members are actually telling them, and it remains to be seen whether the board will do more than nibble around the edges of a big problem.
My opinion is that technical writing, as opposed to technical communication, has been on the decline since the mid-1980s, ironically around the time I began my long career as a technical writer. The STC’s decline merely mirrors the decline in our profession as a whole. As I’ve said in various places before, the primary problems (IMO, of course) are attitude, outsourcing, and budgetary.
Attitude is a big one, but it goes both ways. We’ve constantly had to combat the meme about technical communication being a jumped-up secretarial job rather than a profession on peer with engineering and software development. Recent developments, such as “certificate programs,” have only exacerbated that attitude.
But as I’ve said, the attitude problem isn’t only coming from outside. I’ve seen my fellows jump from fad to fad, chasing that elusive goal of The Next Big Thing, almost from the outset of my career. From “online help” to HTML (and I helped to build one of the first commercial websites ever, in 1992) to DocBook to DITA, we’ve jumped on whatever bandwagon has been playing pretty music at the time. That’s not completely negative — it’s important to explore new technologies and constantly seek to improve the way we do things — but we (as a profession) been hampered by our own reluctance to take ownership of those technologies and make them work for us. Many tech writers want to be able to put their work online (which usually means HTML), but they look at it and go Tags! How 1983! Ickyyyy! If you don’t own your tools, your tools will own you. Or as the kids say these days, “pwn you.” I wonder how many manuals still consist of Word files where every “style” is simply an overridden Normal style — I used to see those all the time up to the last 10 years or so of my career, when I joined a FrameMaker shop and eventually became a lone writer.
This reluctance — or outright refusal — to master the tools of our trade is a big problem. At the very least, it gives our detractors something very real to point at when they say we aren’t a true profession. How long would software developers last if they refused to learn more than the rudiments of whatever programming language or development environment they work with?
Consultants, of course, love this situation, and are happy to defend it — when I published “The XML Heresies” a while back, one of them responded with a hit piece in his newsletter. Several of his fellows were allowed to describe me as myopic and so on, while I was never given a chance to respond (in other words, they burned the heretic at the stake without a trial). Having several people trained enough to maintain a complex documentation system makes it more likely that the system will survive a number of shocks (including key people leaving or budget cuts), but reduces the likelihood that the consultants will continue to get those lucrative support contracts.
We need to be flexible enough to adapt tools with three essential attributes: 1) they work; 2) they are no more complex than what can be maintained by motivated staff; 3) they themselves are flexible enough to be adapted to new uses, and easily adapted to style changes.
Budgets are always a big problem. Documentation, despite its necessity (in whatever form), is considered a cost center — simply because nobody has figured out a way to calculate the actual value added to a product by providing the ability to use it. And since we don’t think we should have to master our tools, anything more complex than FrameMaker is given over to consultants, often costing as much as the burdened salary for a senior writer.
Meanwhile, the work we used to do is seeping away — some to India, some to the general attitude that “nobody needs documentation for this, it’s intuitive!” Part of the latter is true, in a way — “When all else fails, read the manual” has become standard operating procedure for most people these days. We harp about audience analysis, then produce work that the audience isn’t interested in using… the disconnect between the STC board and its members is by far not the only disconnect out there.
Perhaps it’s time to take the name of the STC seriously — Society for Technical Communication — and start thinking of ourselves as technical communicators rather than writers. If people prefer pictures, get a decent camera, learn to use it well, and start shooting. If they want video… my wife edits video, produces training video and other types of commercial work, and I can tell you that what she does is no less a skilled position than writing a manual. All the skills we use now are still relevant, we just have to adapt them to the new media.
So when David asks, Does the STC deserve to survive, I have to answer “Certainly. But it needs to lead the way instead of encouraging The Next Big Thing. It needs to broaden its scope to include more than just lip service to work that does something other than produce a manual or online help. It needs to be more than just a check on a resumé; it needs to ask its members to step out of their tiny comfort zones and start acting like professionals.” And if it can’t do that, then yes, it’s time to replace it.