Today is my 25th anniversary of being hired at Network Data Processing as a Documentation Specialist. My interview on 2/10/1995 was a Friday and scheduled for 9 AM. I talked to multiple people that morning - Vickie Wyatt & Mike Scanlon, Karen Barth, Paulette, and then, I met John Millard, who offered me the position with a starting salary of $17,500. I was a shitty negotiator then as well as now and so I countered with $18,000. He agreed to that salary with the warning that "for that extra $500, you're going to have to work extra hard." I took him seriously.
I've been shaped by many of the people and places I've encountered over the last 25 years. I can look at pretty much any piece of writing and find something I would change. I was in a meeting on January 31, 2018, which seems like yesterday, with my co-worker Teresa. Our task was to design the Knowledge Management process for our department. We were going through existing text in a tool we were using and the laziness of the writing style was infuriating! If you have a heading that says "Do XYZ Task" and an entry field under that has a "Purpose" label, you don't need to start the text that defines "Purpose" with "The purpose of this field is to [verb]..."! When I worked at Quintrex, I would write purpose statements for menu option help text that allowed the user to create and edit records in the system. Early on, I established the standard for these statements. The standard was to frame the first sentence as follows:
[The purpose of this menu option is to] Establish and maintain...
I didn't want to repeat "The purpose of this menu option is to" on each of the hundreds of help text topics that were in that help system. I figured that if I established a standard that I then followed consistently, there would never be any confusion as to how to read the statements. I did this also as a passive-aggressive reaction to the way another type of documentation - most people would call them "Release Notes" but Quintrex called them "Explanation of Changes (EOC)" - had no standard. Those documents were a collective effort as each Quality Assurance team member would add an entry in a Word document to describe the project or call report they had tested - search this blog for more information. All of the above comments about Quintrex relates to software documentation.
I do not plan to work another 25 years before I retire - would be 75 years, 2 months, 6 days if I worked until my 50th anniversary of that morning in Cedar Rapids! I do not think that is what I would want to do. I think back to when I graduated from Mount Mercy College in Cedar Rapids in May 1992, with my BA in English, minor in Secondary Education. I thought I was God's gift to writing and was likely to grade myself as a 'really awesome' writer. Today, after over 25 years as a professional technical writer, I am likely to grade myself as a 'good plus' writer. I'm definitely more self-aware of my strengths and weaknesses as a writing now than I was then. I look forward to the next NN years to push my writing skills to the next level in my artificially concocted level scheme!