So, my thesis prospectus introduction is kind of lame.

Technical writing is not a new thing, as Connors points out “Scholarship has traced technical writing of a quite familiar sort back to the Sumerians, and we need come no farther forward in history than the Roman Empire to find technical writing as lucid and sophisticated as any that is done today.” (4) However, as an “identifiable profession”, the technical writer has only appeared mid 20th century. (Johnson-Eilola xxv) It is not irrational to assume this is due to a certain sophistication of the documentation required for activities of the day. Someone had to provide that documentation and the primary method of delivering that information was written.

Since that time, parallel development of different delivery methods has led to ways to deliver and display that information without a physical book. But before now, they were not ubiquitous due to expense, bulk, and cumbersome communications technology.

At the time of this writing, that is not a problem. For example, this particular document is written on a computer hundreds of times more powerful than the writer’s first computer, and yet this computer weighs less than 3lbs and is capable of communicating with any other computer (and the users thereof) hooked up to the Internet. It is my hypothesis that this inter-communication between any and all users of the Internet has fundamentally changed the way technical documentation is produced and consumed, even to the extent of eliminating the specialized and formal role of “technical communicator” in some circumstances.

Does it get better? I don't know. Again, I keep finding more info the more I look, so I've been looking at the following blog posts:

1. Open Source Tech Writing: The Time Is Now
2. The First Technical Writer (software specific)
3. Manuals: Why They Don't Matter
4. Achieving Balance: Redux

Got to be honest, I've been following Tom Johnson's (of I'd Rather Be Writing shared blog posts on his Google Profile. So, thanks, Tom. You have a consistantly interesting stream of Tech Writing relevant material.

So I might have some tweaking to do. I don't know if there is a happy medium here, because so many tech writers do blog (as writers tend to like to write and therefore do more of it). It might be a little late for a change of topic for me, but it'd be interesting to see how blogging has affected the profession.

I do intend to post most of my thesis/prospectus as I complete it here at least a section a week, if not more. So if you do have any commentary, there is a way to leave that, you know. Or e-mail me. It's all good.