July 28th - August 1st

At the beginning of the week I spent some time revising the roles documentation after our editor had sent back her changes. She changed a lot, but she realized that this was a new process for me so she made sure to comment on almost all of her changes. Most of the changes she made were more of what Carey pointed out during the peer review. She removed lots of unnecessary phrases and pointed out a couple of places where I was inconsistent with terminology. This was my first real contribution of written material that users will end up seeing. Exciting stuff? Not really.

If I walk away from this internship learning one thing, it may be that I really don’t want to be a technical writer. I realize that most jobs are monotonous but I don’t really see myself staying interested in technical writing long enough to make it a career. I guess it all boils down to whether or not I need to be whole-heartedly interested in my work or if I can just suck it up, do my job, and collect a paycheck. I’m sure I can do the latter, but I would much rather find a career that I can take interest in. This is something that I will definitely need to figure out before too long.

Gregg has given me a few more topics to edit for part of the Technical Documentation teams content improvement plan. This time I am working on a few pages from that cover the radial toolbar feature. In the NX software, radial toolbars are just like shortcut menus that can be accessed anywhere on the screen to allow for quick access to frequently used commands. Swarna the editor and Andy (another member of the team) have decided that the four pages that cover the radial toolbars might be too much. They figure that the information can be condensed to about one or two short pages.

The rest of the week I spent shaving off excess information from the radial toolbar documentation. I also spent some time creating new graphics for the documentation. The team uses Paint Shop Pro to create graphics. It is a pretty straight forward application and I was able to make some simple and clear graphics to supplement the text.