"Calling the beautiful, amazing, brilliant things people create online 'user-generated content' is like sliding up to your lady, putting your arm around her and whispering, 'Hey baby, let's have intercourse."'
Is this guy on crack? Most of what I read on the Internet, particularly in blogs, is not inspired, nor brilliant, nor particularly creative. And for the record, I include my own blogs in that category. It's part work, part conversation, which is about all one can expect given the short time we have to write and publish these things inbetween doing our real jobs. An exception, at least for me, is reading Kathy Sierra's blog Creating Passionate Users. The quality of Kathy's writing is always first rate.
More importantly, Powazek's rant contributes to the schism that exists between technical writers and "writers". Is a technical writer a writer? I think that many don't believe that they are, which is a shame. Perhaps if more of us considered ourselves professional writers, we'd put more effort into refining our documentation and both we and the end user (sorry for saying 'user', Derek) would be the better for it.
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I don't feel like a "writer" when I'm working as a technical writer, even though it's right there in the job title.
When I work as a technical writer, I focus on the technical parts, and deliberately keep the actual writing as basic and transparent and consistent as possible. It's not simple to right simply, but I don't enjoy it in the same way as non-technical writing, where I can play with words and sentences in a different way.
I think it's because I restrict myself in technical writing that it doesn't feel like "writing".
And, I'll have to add myself to the list of people whose blogs are crap. Despite my best intentions, mine is nothing more than the first drafts of short random interjections. That's not "writing" either.
Posted by: Mark Moloney | April 5, 2006 11:23 PM | Permalink to Comment