One day, after a brief, but frustrating, interaction with a coworker, I was left feeling exactly like the poor guy portrayed in this image – like I had got kicked in the head and my head was spinning. As I walked away from that interaction I, only half-jokingly, said to myself: “Was it something I said?”
Despite recognizing that my coworker was at fault in this situation, I also knew that the burden of finding a solution was on me.
One of the fundamental skills needed to be a successful technical writer – in addition to being able to, you know, actually write coherently – is the ability to work with people. As technical writers, we typically have a veritable plethora of in-house experts we call on to extract specific, detailed information about the subject we are writing about: product owners, product managers, programmers, QA, IT, UX designers – we must interact with them all. We do ...