I started my technical writing career in South Florida, after several years as a grants writer and administrator of Cooperative Education Programs at Palm Beach Community College, now Palm Beach State College.

My role as a Career Development Instructor and Coop Ed Coordinator put me in touch with local employers and opened my eyes to the needs of employers and to the short and long-term needs of college graduates. The
employers needed "competency-based curriulum" so that the graduates that they hired had the skills to
perform their jobs. I began to write curriculum, but that was not the whole solution. Our graduates were missing
two keys that would ensure career development after they secured a job related to their college major:

• Generic job survival skills—often missing from both the Associate's and Bachelor's degree programs.
• Job-specific user guides and online help—often missing or too general to be useful.

I discovered my true calling: technical writing! The technical writer can provide the end user with specific
step-by-step procedures for each process that the job requires, and can also provide reference help that describes
each element on a screen or page, for example, each button, input field, drop-down or selection list, each filter or
column header.

I came to the conclusion that I was a "pretty good" technical writer when IBM hired me, as a contractor, to write a
user guide for the world-wide rollout of their first retail venture: a software program for continuous voice recognition
called ViaVoice. The Project Director stated that the reason they hired me was that "did not want another IBM Army
manual."

I was so wrong! I was far from "pretty good." I had a lot to learn. My editor, Andrea Rutherford, used the MSTP Bible
(Microsoft Standards for Technical Publicatons) to edit and reshape my user guide into something that even
Strunk & White (Elements of Style) would approve of! Yes, dear readers, the Strunk & White Bible allows prepositions (such as of) at the end of a sentence!

Now, I consider myself a pretty good writer, and "far above the ordinary" because every user guide, quick reference
guide, and every set of steps in an online help topic are clear, precise, and simple—per MSTP as my editor, and with
an imaginary Andrea Rutherford looking over my shoulder.