> I have noticed that graduate study (up to but not necessarily
> including a PhD) is good training for software technical writing.
>
> 1. It teaches you good research skills
> 2. It teaches you how to work completely alone
> 3. It teaches you that all the stuff people call "knowledge" is just
> variously made up and so it makes you less afraid of dealing with a
> realm in which everything is made up as you go along (software).
> 4. It teaches you how to write books
Wow, you must know some pretty special people. Nearly all the people I know who went to grad school (including those who completed their PhD, a minority):
1. Can't do research to save their lives. Why look things up? It's so much easier (and satisfying!) to just make guesses and posture about things. Or worse: have a clever thought and claim you discovered something really interesting (except that it has already been considered and discarded long ago). My favorite question: have you looked around to see if this has been done before? Blank stares.
One thing that I've noticed is that grad school does NOT teach you good research skills, unless you're getting an MLS of course. What it teaches you is that if you've found some way to pick up and develop reasonable research skills on your own, you're ahead of the pack. But: no training actually occurs in this subject.
2. Get nothing done (I don't mean 80%, 90%, or even 95% -- I'm talking about getting things actually COMPLETE) unless pressured, and then it's often late and thus of poor quality (planning counts!) ... this mirrors the only "output" from grad school: the conference paper that is invariably full of handwaving and doctored graphics. This translates easily into shoddy Powerpoint presentations in your future.
3. Take your #3 to heart and become one of those people who variously makes things up as they go along ...
4. Talk about writing books, but never complete even abstracts or whole papers. Their dissertation is the last thing they ever complete, and even that took years beyond what it should have.
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# "Ok, you've got a Ph.D. ... just don't touch anything!"
/jordan