Boolean bullsh*t, or the scourge called technical writing

(No one has written on this topic so far; I might as well post this one from 199x, with some nip and tuck here and there, of course.)

Dolomitization. Martensitic characterization. Asynchronous transmission mode. Kaizen. Codecs. PCMCIA. Reverse engineering. Rapid prototyping. VOCs. Closed-loop operations. Fractals. Fuzzy logic. XLPE insulation. What the heck are these? Answer: technical terms, and you wouldn't want to touch them with a ten-foot pole.

Dealing with technical words is an experience in animal cruelty. And I don’t know what to call it when you deal with such terms on a day-to-day basis. What I know is trying to figure out such terms one by one, studying how precisely each word is defined, is the mental equivalent of tongue-twisting.

I should know. I’ve been a technical tongue-twister, or what you may call in layman’s term a technical writer.

Is technical writing a writing job? Good question. Is technical writing writing? Is a technical writer a ‘writer’? Don’t ask. Writing about technical things is not fun the way, say, an essayist writes his Livejournal or blog entry for the day. Unfortunately, technicalities have long been my bread and butter. These ugly jargons are capable of making me throw up even as I throw my hands up in the air, but I didn’t have much choice but to swallow the bitter pill anyway (to switch metaphors; I could've said vomit). I’m talking here about my meal for the day.

For the most part, I’ve been what they call an abstractor, one who summarizes magazine and trade/professional journal articles for a fee, as part of the larger goal of compiling these summaries, publishing them in a book form or other forms of media (often online) as a handy tool to help nosy people (students, researchers) access choice information. This crazy job is also part of what has been called “information processing” (translation: mostly data encoding-types of job), one of those earliest tasks farmed off by the US to ‘keep companies at home competitive.’ Outsourcing!

Housed in a computerized sweatshop, abstractors are trained and then required to churn out a target number of summaries or abstracts daily to meet a certain pre-set quota. Where I worked, I ‘abstracted’ articles culled from virtually every English-language engineering magazine and journal from around the world, primarily the US, England, Australia, Germany, France, and Japan. Name a major country, or even an obscure one -- I’ve worked on a publication shipped all the way from there. In one project that we worked on, documents were shipped centrally to the capital of the world, New York City. When terrorists bombed the World Trade Center, there was of course a major disruption in our workflow.

Working for a foreign client, itself with clients all over the world, abstractors at the department I worked in were ironically alienated from their immediate world as they tried to grapple with generally unheard-of and thankless topics within the confines of their air-conditioned ‘office.’ A given day would be a torturous face-off with, say, the latest development in, uhm, forklifts, winches, actuators, cams, and manifolds. Normally, I am such a snob, and my favorite topics include natural history, politics, the humanities, and society in general, so you could just imagine how I suffered from hemorrhage every time I started pounding the keyboard to attempt at a passably coherent composition about, say, a fluorophore-labeled carbohydrate analysis of immunoglobulin fusion proteins and the correlation of oligosaccharide content with in vivo clearance profile.

It was a life that can be best described as non-life, but beggars can’t be choosers, right? In a bid not to be a total loser, I resolved to live my quaint circumstance to the fullest and this meant that, from day to day, I saw to it that I got the most from what I read. I feigned profound interest in utterly uninteresting things. For instance, I faked great passion in knowing the effect of defect data analysis on the quality and reliability of semiconductor products, to get started. (Did you get that? You’re not supposed to; I didn’t. But it’s an actual title of an empirical study.)

Then there were the other self-deceptions necessary for survival. I grabbed those as an opportunity to prop up my deflated ego. I tried to pretend I knew more things than anybody else at any given moment. I pretended I was too privileged to have read about certain things in advance. I tried to read an article with the clear intent of boasting, furthering my ‘knowledge base’ to a state more advanced than even that of the most updated know-it-alls: newspaper columnists! Everyday was a day to sustain that exercise in vainglorious self-image. Ah, the defense mechanisms I had to concoct just to cope up with the unique non-demands of the job! Yeah, I know. Pathetic.

I also tried to do some existentialist contemplation in the middle of spotting my own grammatical errors. I asked myself time and again if I, or what I was doing, was of any value to society, to the world. I often tried to convince myself that, yes, the findings of this or that experiment could spell a revolutionary if not a profound impact on our future. Hey, was I lucky to have had a hand in the transmission of that information!

But oftentimes, I also got attacked by pangs of guilt. Shouldn’t I choose to teach instead, or do some even more unglamorous research work at some godforsaken, decrepit government laboratory? At least, my role, or significance, would be a lot more obvious there, and my self-image a lot healthier.

Sometimes I ended up convincing myself in my exercise in self-delusion; you know what they say about lies that are repeated a hundred times. Things worked out so well if I feigned half-fulfillment, if I got to convince myself that I was such a great service to humanity because my, uhm, writing somehow facilitated world peace or the advancement of human civilization. Without my service, I thought our clients - the end-users hungry for information - would die searching for the specific, inconsequential factoids they were Googling for before they’d ever find it. Given today’s mind-boggling surfeit of information, compounded by the avalanche of clashing opinions on these facts, I was convinced I could be useful in some way. I found that it’s good to play that game if I had to survive.

My string of technical writing jobs was relatively a high-paying one, if that’s any consolation (it's actually a pittance compared to the actual rates in dollars), considering all I apparently did was sit and think and tap away at the keyboard. After meeting a certain quota for the day, I got to be paid by the article. There was a kind of incentive scheme offered, thankfully, and it helped to pay the bills. The major tradeoff, however, is that this job ate up a huge chunk of my time. If you are not the type of person who would get stuck with an impersonal computer for more than eight hours a day, do not even consider this kind of job.

Nonetheless, if you are an aspiring writer, this job could help you a lot in sharpening the saw. You learn the tricks of the trade the hard way, but you learn a lot. There were also none of the usual organizational chart complexities to contend with, with lots of power-trippers involved. Schedules are less rigid because flexi-time is often allowed. But the following requirements are big deal: the willingness to learn about all forms of uninteresting trivia, a good reading and writing skill, and a healthy eyesight. Of course this set of requirements presupposes a reasonable IQ, facility with the English language (especially passion for vocabulary), an ergonomic working environment, and a healthy level of beta carotene.

In this job, bizarre words, phrases, and acronyms crop up endlessly from the most unexpected places. I view these neologisms, or latest word inventions, philosophically, i.e., as an indication that man is still in the process of unlocking the secrets of the universe, basic secrets, and he has yet to get tired of it. He’s, in fact, just getting started. The fields tend to be overly specialized, though, as to totally shut off outsiders, as to render the world too compartmentalized*; there are certain fields where the rate of knowledge accumulation is impossibly fast: computing. After a period of getting used to all these esoterica, though – which translates to a million trips to technical dictionaries – I have managed to eventually shed off some of my initial repugnance for all that technobabble and realized that there’s nothing in this life that can’t be learned, and everything could be even likeable if you hate them long enough. I guess it’s no different from the working definition of ‘love’ (it’s a decision, you know).

This sort of writing, it later became apparent to me, meant an even greater amount of reading (background reading, cross-reference reading) – and yet, reading about something is just that: being a wide reader. Yes, no amount of reading can ever compare to a first-hand exposure. For example, a visit to an actual paper mill to see its daily operations and state-of-the-art equipment will prove far more invaluable to one’s memory than reading about it every single day. No matter how much I was equipped with the most remarkable document retrieval system (my brain?), I wouldn’t stand a chance next to the actual visual, tactile, sensory experience of something as intimidating as anything technical, like an actual inspection of a catamaran’s Stirling engine or something, as compared to a mere magazine picture of it. In other words, a technical writing job will improve your personal database system, but it has the capacity to steal you away from real life, so it’s important to get out from time to time and get a life or at least a whiff of real life.

In this day job, I’ve hopped from project to project -- from all fields of engineering, to psychology, to medicine, and to such specialty areas as water science, aerospace science, clothing technology, and population studies. The weirdest project I had handled, though, was a ‘corporate account,’ and it was called… ‘document titling,’ let’s just say: giving appropriate titles to untitled corporate documents (a lot of it top-secret), for litigation purposes. I held this job not just because no one in the office could do them, but because no one would have anything to do with them. Everybody knew it was a cushy-sounding writing job, but no, it’s actually more of a 'dirty part of the job' thing. No one but me got willingly fooled.

There are many other things I’ve learned in this writing ‘gig’ called abstracting, but that would mean getting even more technical about it. You wouldn’t want that, would you?

**

Update:

*You might want to check out the ff. posts relating to the compartmentalization of knowledge:

Way of the Euglena
Moronization of the world
Lines and life