The term “technical writer” isn’t one I like much, at least not to describe myself. It calls up an image of someone who sits and writes simple procedures that are printed on sterile-white sheets of paper. (It’s sad when I’m a technical communicator myself, and I still have certain stereotypes in my head.) To me, a technical writer does just what the title suggests—just writes.

To prove to myself that I’m more than a tech writer, I tracked my work time last week, classifying my activities in general categories. Out of a full work week, I spent only about four hours writing, not including emails because I don’t count email-writing as technical writing. These four hours of writing activity included on-the-fly revising that is a standard part of writing for me, so I didn’t break out how much of that time was revising vs. active writing.

I was involved in more meetings than usual due to coordinating training for an application rollout, but the total amount of writing was probably on the lower end of normal.

The following list describes activities I tracked last week, plus other tasks I may perform on other days but may not have had to do during last week, not listed in any particular order:

  • Staff meetings
  • Information gathering
  • Help debugging
  • Translation work
  • Training planning
  • Documentation writing/editing
  • Helping designer with prototype text
  • Answering customer questions
  • Prototype feedback
  • Task for team manager
  • Coworker help
  • Project meetings
  • Email
  • Training setup
  • User training
  • Demo scripting
  • Demo recording and manipulation
  • Training scripting
  • Image creation and editing
  • CSS editing

It’s not like my self-image will suffer if someone calls me a tech writer, or if I refer to myself as one. But if I tell people that’s what I am, they have notions about what that means, and I’d be surprised if those notions matched what I actually do. I used to think it’s ironic when the wordsmiths can’t come up with a good title for themselves, but in a recent conversation with my manager’s manager, we decided that it’s a symptom of the perfectionism in us.

Related entries (auto-generated):

The Technical Writer Lens

Release Scrums: An Important Resource for the Agile Technical Writer

Dealing with the Friday Afternoon Doldrums

Technical Writer vs. Daydreamer: Not So Distant After All

The Importance of Communication Skills over Technical Skills