I am very excited to actually begin the “real” work on the project this week, as technical writing will probably be the death of me. While I understand that these documents are part of the process, honestly, I hate them. This is not a complaint, just a simple fact, and I would like it to be noted. I understand why people get the impression that STEM folks are all boring nerds, technical documents are so dry you will literally be physically and mentally dehydrated after reading one. In my opinion writing them is far worse, like crawling through a desert.
The one exception to my technical writing hatred is making figures. Figures are technically not part of the actual technical writing, but as they are essential to the overall technical document, I believe, technically, they count. They are my oasis in desert, a refreshing break in between the dunes of text. I don’t think anything would make me happier than if the only thing I was responsible for was spending hours on Figma making an aesthetically beautiful and functional mockup of our proposed site design.
Also, it’s not just limited to making mock-ups and wireframes. I love a good database schema or ER diagram. I think tangibly organizing my thoughts so I have a better grasp of how the relationships between the entities might work is very satisfying. It also shows me the gaps in my logic or plan that I need to fill in or revise.
Maybe it’s just part of being in STEM, but I believe a lot of my frustration creating these documents comes from the feeling that language alone can be incredibly limiting as far as communicating your ideas. I don’t want to try to explain in complete sentences how things will work because I don’t think I’m particularly good at it, I just want to show you. I could write paragraph after paragraph trying to verbally communicate how I think the home page should look and function, or I could make a mock-up with a couple notes and convey way more information with a much smaller margin for confusion.
One of the members of my team has a few years experience working as a professional software engineer, and they have been an integral part in the ease of this first phase of our project. They very clearly seem to have an image of how all the parts of this website need to come together, and getting to pester them with questions has greatly expanded my understanding of web development. They also mentioned that while these documents are genuinely part of the processes, very rarely are the actual developers the ones writing them. This information brought me much joy.
All in all I am very pleased with how the project is going thus far. There are almost always a few things you can find to to complain about, as with anything in life, but as long as the list of good stuff is longer than the list of bad stuff, I will be happy. If trekking through the technical writing desert is the most difficult part of the project, I’d say I’ve got it pretty good.
