Feature

Ivory Tower or Real World?

by John Thurston, PhD

In the "new economy", we will all have serial careers — so contemporary pundits say. This decree certainly describes the trajectory that I, in the early years of career number two, have followed from a humanist milieu into the world of technology. I abandoned academia to become a technical writer.

In my translation from the "ivory tower" to the "real world", it became clear that the two realms, while different in many ways, share many features. Understanding the similarities and differences is especially important, because humanist ideals frequently clash with the realities that the business world imposes on us daily. The hurdles of a serial career become more manageable with this understanding, but fundamental questions also arise.

Foiled Ambitions

In my own case, after completing a master's degree in English, I spent more than a decade on a career path that should have ended in tenure and a guaranteed income for the remainder of my working days. I did everything right: PhD, teaching assistant, conference papers, publication (essays and a book), teaching contracts, a postdoctoral fellowship. Nonetheless, I failed to alight in that safe, tenured nest.

Although some of the factors that influenced my change of career were personal, I'd place some responsibility with the new economy. Fiscal conservatism rules. University budgets, especially for the humanities, continue to be cut. Members of groups targeted for affirmative action get the few available jobs. Tenured positions created in the booming '60s and '70s are dropped as members of that fortunate generation retire. Graduate schools turn out record numbers of PhDs, while the departments that might employ them suffer further cuts or are shut down altogether.

Crossing Over

Everyone facing the challenge of a career change should be as fortunate as I in crossing from academia to the business world. Before my fellowship was finished, I landed a contract with a small consulting firm for an internal research project. At the time, I had no idea what I should charge. Just as well I didn't. If I had charged a decent per diem, I would have lost the contract.

As it turned out, I earned about a dollar and a half per hour for this project. The president of the firm liked my work enough to hire me for further contracts. People will tell you not to underprice yourself for contract work lest you create an expectation that you will continue to work cheap. I learned that when you're starting a new career, you take what you can get and you try to impress those you work for; if they come back for more, then you can adjust your rates.

I did other contract work, was hired full-time, and gradually developed a market definition of myself: I realized that what I was doing was, broadly, technical writing. With this vague self-definition, I focussed my career objectives and identified job opportunities. A little more than three years after I began to wean myself from my academic ambitions, I took a position as a technical writer — starting salary in the range of base salary for new faculty.

What's Shared

During my career change, I discovered that I had transferable skills. Although the subject matter and the goals differ, both academics and technical writers must be able to learn and to communicate what they learn. Some of the shared characteristics that contribute to these abilities are:

• An aptitude for learning. This quality is indispensable for successful scholars and technical writers. Technical writers cannot be experts in all of the technologies they may be expected to write about. They should, however, be equipped to become instant experts. Native curiosity, expressed as a desire to find out what lies behind the interface, is part of their equipment.
• Research abilities. If you've ever generated enthusiasm for the arcane essay topics assigned in upper-level humanities courses or (worse) assigned those topics and marked those essays, then you can muster the necessary engagement with research that technical writers are called upon to perform. You will know how to narrow the focus, identify likely sources, follow leads, and accept the boons of serendipity.
• An ability to synthesize data. Both academics and technical writers must be able to take the results of their research and transform them into informative prose, comprehensible to the layperson. Beyond simply writing well, they must cultivate the ability to extract, from a wealth of detail, only those facts that the audience needs.
• Teaching experience. The production of user documentation presents a continuum from writing help files to delivering face-to-face training. Many of the skills required in the attempt to embed knowledge into undergraduate minds are the same as those needed to train users of specialized software.

What's Different

The differences between the academic and business worlds are legion, but I'll only remark on a few. I was never securely enough ensconced in academia to encounter all its characteristics in their purest form, anyway.

Tenured academics may be immune to performance reviews, but if you lack a tenured position, your performance is always subject to review, as in the business world. Anyone who is conscientious about work feels the pressure to perform, regardless of level of job security. An awareness of how your performance contributes to the financial health of the organization is required in business, although it should be more pressing in the university.

While deadlines are universal, the consequences of shirking them are less dire on the academic side. Consequences being what they are in the business world, the assurance gained from adhering to time lines, meeting milestones, and following established processes are more often sought after.

The direction in which deference flows differs in the pursuits of teaching and technical writing. As students need approval for their work from professors, so do technical writers need the approval of their clients or employers. Professors turned technical writers rediscover something of how their students once felt toward them.

What any frustrated academic will likely find the most regrettable in the business world is the lack of opportunities to follow personal research interests. But research interests develop over time, and can change to suit circumstances. Many technical writing projects, however, don't involve extensive research at all. Further, writing in an academic context is often in itself a process of exploration, a continuation of research, while technical writing is more likely to be the articulation of what the writer already knows.

Is It a Matter of Worth?

Consideration of the differences experienced on a personal level by professors and technical writers in their research and writing tasks leads to larger social issues. Technical writing, in its many genres and media, has become one of the popular literatures of our day. Compared to the audience for user guides and help files, the audience for academic writing is minute. Critical essays dealing with, say, obscure nineteenth-century writers, sweated over for months, may never have the readership of a help file that can be produced in a few weeks.

On the other hand, technical information quickly becomes dated. Those thick user guides turn into the door stops they seem to have been designed to become. Solid cultural knowledge, in contrast, is enhanced by the passage of time. And as that knowledge slowly seeps into society through the classroom and other outlets, its source can become more valued.

We might, nonetheless, be losing our cultural memories. Scholars contribute significantly to the preservation and enrichment of cultural memory and intelligence. But our computers, aided by technical writers, might be tuning our minds to be receptive only to the types of information that computers can most efficiently produce: information without context, depth, beauty, or subtlety.

We are buried in ephemeral words and images, the detritus of our environment. In ivory tower eyries, scholars sift that detritus. Technical writers do their sifting in more accessible locales. The results of their sifting empowers people in the most quotidian terms, those of the workplace. Yet, giving workers the information and skills that they need to do their jobs is important.

No cultural theorist will ever have the immediate impact that the producer of a good on-line help file for an important application will. But somewhere down the road, the nuggets of knowledge that theorist sifts from the detritus may come to light.

Remainders

The move from the ivory tower to the real world requires abandoning active commitment to the disinterested goals of culture and education. The pressures to which humanists bow when they make this transition are pressures that are forcing our society to cast fertile seeds on arid soil. A generation of scholars that would till our cultural ground is being driven into it. We should not wonder if the fruit withers and is inedible.

Technic is taking over. At what cost? To whose benefit? What are erstwhile humanists to make of it? Can we realistically adjust our values and goals without selling out? We must recognize necessity and then summon the adaptability and intelligence to act in accordance with that recognition.

If we partake of the spirit of the age, at least we cannot complain of being short-changed. The stance of the aloof critic is only possible if you enjoy tenure or its equivalent. As "progress" obliviously roars on, this stance increasingly seems like ineffectual sour grapes. We must speak from within the hurly-burly of the moment, or it will pass us by — as it may do anyway.

I, and others, straddle the division between a humanistic philosophy first articulated by an elite that flourished amid the general squalor of the medieval world, and a technological reality that has yet to generate a world view that will speak to the masses under its sway: a 500-year-old tale in tatters versus a story of the coming millennium that has yet to be convincingly told. Perhaps, as technical writers, we are telling it.

John Thurston holds a doctorate in English. He has written The Work of Words: The Writing of Susanna Strickland Moodie (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996), as well as numerous published articles on early nineteenth-century Canadian literature. More recently, he has produced several help files and computer manuals.