Technical Writers and the Subject Matter Expert (SME)

There has been some discussion on Techwr-L about how SMEs review text that is sent to them for review. The purpose of the SME review is to find any technical glitches in the text the tech writer has written, based upon the SME fuller understanding of the topic. I thought about the ideas in these posts and found them relevant to what happened yesterday.

I was having an okay day - not the greatest, not the best - when my manager sent an email out that said a developer, Christopher, is working on a hot project and that it adds a new value to our system.

When new values are added to our system, it means work for me. There is end-user and internal documentation to update so I have a vested interest in making sure the text that is used is something I can easily translate for the end-user. The email I'm referring to included text in a e-mail from our project manager with proposed text for the new value. When I read the original text, I didn't understand why it had to use so many words. It seemed to greatly complicate the purpose and functionality in the new value.

I replied to my manager that it was the most wordy description for a value I had seen in my 10 years here and that I was working on a rewrite. She replied back that she wanted to review the rewrite.

I sent a proposed rewrite to Christopher via ICQ. He sent back a reply with revised text. We went back and forth, negotiating, before he walked over to my cubicle. We negotiated some more (~1/2 hour total) and hammered through what the system value actually did, how it affected the system, and what text best described it. After negotiations were complete, I sent this to my manager, cc'ing the developer, with this text:

Christopher and I have been negotiating the verbiage for the ... description associated with this project. We are both satisfied with this rewrite. This blurb is for the end-user.

She replied "Great Thanks."

So, I thought, my manager knows that Christopher and I worked together, as a team, as we're all supposed to do, but what about Christopher's manager?

I then sent that e-mail on to Christopher's manager with a note that said "The fruit of the Technical Writer working with Development..."

My point is that Christopher, the SME, helped me out and, for his efforts, I gave Christopher positive feedback. This is not the first value we have negotiated and probably won't be the last.