Selling Yourself Short: Impostor Syndrome among Tech Writers
This month, documentarians gathered around the #watercooler for a legendary discussion of impostor syndrome. Is there more impostor syndrome among technical writers than other tech professionals? Do writers shortchange themselves by saying things like “that’s too technical for me” in work discussions? Does this contribute to a lack of respect for technical writers?
The consensus seemed to be a resounding “YES” to all three questions, and people offered many thoughtful ideas about why tech writers might experience impostor syndrome more keenly than most:
And that’s just a thin summary of this rich conversation! Although we don’t usually share out the transcripts of the conversations we highlight, this one so clearly struck a chord that we thought we’d save – and anonymize – the whole thing, It’s available in this gist, if you want to read the whole discussion, including some ideas for impostor syndrome relief.
- Writing is an ‘endemic skill,’ meaning it’s practically universal, to at least a basic degree. That can make it challenging for people to recognize mastery because, on the surface, it’s hard to distinguish mastery from what everyone else is doing.
- This underlying, “anyone can write” assumption gets particularly troublesome when used to justify the opinion that tech writers’ chief value is that they free up engineers to write code.
- Technical writers’ knowledge gaps are front-and-center because they typically rely on subject matter experts to confirm what they write, as well as to provide feedback and corrections.
- Technical writing has historically been female-dominated, and even the most accomplished women sometimes rely on self-deprecating language to shield themselves from criticism.
- Technical writing roles don’t always have clear lines of specialization like other roles in the tech environment.
I will admit I regret going to their website this AM because, if I hadn't, I wouldn't have seen this:
Is it its / it's confusion? The answer is "yes" unless this is what the writer meant You can see more about our podcast on it is own dedicated..., which makes no sense.
No comments:
Post a Comment