Document Hack (A Technical Writer’s Journal): Working Together Separately

After two months of graphics edits, I am finally nearing publication of the documents I have been hacking at since last October. At this point, all that is left is to make the documents as readable and attractive as is possible under the circumstances. The people on my team are examining each document — looking for grammar errors, spelling errors, and formatting errors.

We caught most of the errors during earlier edits, but the point of this pass is to ensure that the documents are ready for publication. The documents we are working on are not meant for the public, so they do not have to be flashy (and they aren’t) but they will be read by a key client who will be developing tools based on our product. That client must have documentation that works for them, and that means it needs to be clearly written and cleanly presented.

There are currently three of us working on the documents. Each of us lives and works in a different city. One person is a regular employee (which means she is in charge) and the other is a contractor who has some time to help get this document out. We communicate through e-mails and phone conversations. We track our project using an Excel spreadsheet that resides on out Documentum server.

Unfortunately, ours is not the only project tracked by this spreadsheet. More than once, I have spent valuable time fixing the damage done to the spreadsheet by the anonymous people who work on related projects. I cannot really blame the other people. Excel is a Microsoft product. With Microsoft, you must expect and even plan for errors.

Working with people across long distances is part of doing business these days. Both of my editing partners live in the United States, which is where I live, but I have also worked with SMEs across Asia. At other companies, I have worked with people in Germany, Ireland, Australia, Canada and Scandinavia. Sometimes the distance is smaller. This company has another division just ten miles away.

I only work with one other person who is also on site. There are four other people around who perform similar functions, but we have only a passing acquaintance. Most of the people near me are on a completely different project and work for a different business group.

One of the keys to working with people across distances, especially as a writer, is patience. In many cases, you will not get the answer you want when you want it, especially is you are separated from the other person by several time zones. The SMEs in Asia are just showing up to work as I am leaving, and I work late. You get used to asking a question and then moving on — finding other things to do until the issue is resolved.

In many cases, by the time the answer comes back, you have to check your notes just to remember what you were asking about in the first place. This can be a painful process if you do not keep good records of what you are doing. For this reason, I prefer e-mail to voicemail. It is difficult to remember exactly what you said, but easier to bring up something you wrote. Whatever your method, always keep some sort of record of who you have requested things from, and exactly what you requested. It is also good to have a plan for how long you will wait before you ask again.

The main point to remember when working within a group that does not share a location is that the entire group is dealing with the same problems you are dealing with. While you are waiting for one person to answer a question, they are waiting on another person. Everyone is in the same boat, even if their part of the boat is in a different city or country. Sometimes you need to be proactive. You might need to set up a teleconference to hammer things out, even if it means staying three hours late or coming in three hours early. You might need to guess about an answer and come back to it later. Whatever the problem, you must find a way to do your job. That is why they pay you so much money.

MFA Program Profile: University of Missouri-St. Louis

Mary Troy, Director, MFA Program
Department of English
University of Missouri-St. Louis
8001 Natural Bridge Road
St. Louis, MO 63121

Phone: 314-516-6845
Email: marytroy@umsl.edu
Web Site: www.umsl.edu/divisions/artscience/english/creative/creative.htm
Program Length: 2 Years
Residency: Traditional
School Funding: Public
Admissions Basis: Applicants to the MFA program must have an undergraduate degree, preferably with at least 18 hours of English courses above the freshman level, nine of them in literature. The writing sample is the most important part of the application:15-20 poems or 20-40 pages of fiction (usually two or three short stories). Letters of recommendation from former teachers (one or two) are optional, and scores from the GRE aptitude test are not required. However, letters of recommendation and GRE scores are required of applicants seeking a teaching assistantship or financial aid
Programs: Fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and poetry translation

Costs:
Spring 2005 Rate
Missouri residents: $324.75 per credit hour including all fees and parking
Nonresidents: $727.15 per credit hour including all fees.

Key Faculty:

Ruth Ellen Kocher (MFA and Ph.D., Arizona State University) has written three books of poetry, Desdemona’s Fire (Lotus Press, 1999, winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Award), When the Moon Knows You’re Wandering (New Issues Press, 2002, winner of the Green Rose Prize), and One Girl Babylon ( New Issues Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gettysburg Review, and Prairie Schooner, as well as in two anthologies, NewSister Voices and New Bones: Contemporary Black Writers in America.

Steven Schreiner (MFA University of Iowa, Ph.D. Wayne State University) is the author of Too Soon To Leave, a book of poetry (Ridgeway, 1997). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, Malahat Review, Indiana Review, Cincinnati Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Poet and Critic, and other journals. Several have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes.

Howard Schwartz (MA Washington University) has published three books of poems: Vessels, Gathering the Sparks, and Sleepwalking Beneath the Stars, as well as several books of fiction, including The Captive Soul of the Messiah, Adam’s Soul, and The Four Who Entered Paradise. He has edited a four-volume set of Jewish folktales for Oxford University Press and has been awarded a D.H.L. from the Spertus Institute of Judaica.

Mary Troy (MFA University of Arkansas) is the author of the short story collection Joe Baker Is Dead, 1998, which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award, and The Alibi Cafe and Other Stories, 2003. She has published stories in journals like Boulevard, The Greensboro Review, River Styx, American Literary Review, American Fiction, and The Chicago Tribune. She won a Nelson Algren Award, and three stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes.

Eamonn Wall (Ph.D. City University of New York) is the author of three collections of poetry: Dyckman-200th Street (1994), Iron Mountain Road (1997), and The Crosses (2000). His collection of personal and literary essays, From the Sin-e Cafe to the Black Hills (2000), was co-winner of the Durkan Prize for 2000, given by the American Conference for Irish Studies. He is a Jefferson Smurfit Professor of Irish Studies at UM-St. Louis.

Their Program Description:

The Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (MFA), administered by the UM-St. Louis Department of English, provides opportunities for growth in the writing of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and poetry translation, as well as practical training in literary editing. The plan of study is flexible, and the size of the program (40 students total)fosters a strong sense of each writer’s identity and ensures close contact between students and faculty.

Students ordinarily specialize in one genre, either fiction or poetry, and regular workshops in these forms are at the heart of the degree program. Workshops are also offered frequently in personal essay writing and occasionally in novel writing and poetry translation. Five workshops are required for the degree, though more may be taken as electives. Students also take at least five courses from a rich array of other offerings in the department, choosing from graduate courses in literary journal editing, literature, composition theory, and linguistics. A final writing project of three hours (with a six-hour option available for novelists) completes the 39-hour program. This final project is an independent tutorial with a member of the creative writing faculty. Classes are offered in the evenings from 4:00 o’clock on and occasionally in the summer session. Students attend full- or part-time, completing the degree in from two to six years. Each fall there is a mandatory 2 day session of talks and panels and readings, and all MFA students are required to attend. We try to schedule this for a Friday and Saturday so it does not interfere with normal activity too much.

MFA Program Profile: Brooklyn College

Contact:

Professor Mark Patkowski
Deputy Chairperson for Graduate Studies
Department of English
Brooklyn College
2900 Bedford Avenue
Brooklyn, New York 11210-2889

Phone: 718-951-5197
Email: profmp@earthlink.net (Mark Patkowski)
Web Site: depthome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/graduate/mfa/geninfo.htm
Program Length: 2 Years
Residency: Traditional
School Funding: Public
Admissions Basis: application form, official transcripts, two letters of recommendation, and a manuscript (for fiction, about thirty pages; for poetry, about twenty pages; for playwriting, one full-length play, or two or more one-act plays).
Programs: Fiction, poetry, playwriting

Costs:

For residents of New York State, tuition is $230 per credit; for nonresidents and international students, tuition is $425 per credit.

Financial aid, fellowships and graduate assistantships available

Key Faculty:

Fiction
Jonathan Baumbach
Amy Bloom
Susan Choi
Michael Cunningham
Carey Harrison
Ernesto Mestre
Mary Morris
Jenny Ofill

Poetry
Julie Agoos
L.S. Asekoff
Richard Pearse

Playwriting
Alison Solomon
Mac Wellman

Their Program Description:

The MFA program at Brooklyn College is a small, highly personal two-year program that confers Masters of Fine Arts degrees in fiction, poetry, and playwriting. It offers workshops, seminars, and one-on-one tutorials. It particularly emphasizes relationships between faculty and students. We of the administration and faculty fully appreciate the fact that writing is vitally important work, and that anyone who wants to write well deserves to be treated with discernment and respect. We think of ourselves as helping the next generation of writers find the voices and visions that are uniquely their own.

The fiction-writing program at Brooklyn College is a two-year course that maintains an enrollment of twenty-five to thirty students. While every member of the ongoing and visiting faculty works according to his or her methods, we are united in our conviction that newer writers need a balance of encouragement and serious, thoroughly-considered feedback.

The curriculum is designed sequentially. Fiction-writing students take a writing workshop every semester. Beginning in the fall of 2004, the program will offer two traditional workshops and a novel-writing workshop each semester. The novel-writing workshop is meant to address the particular needs of students who are writing novels, and who would prefer to receive input on longer sections than a traditional workshop allows. The novel-writing workshops are open to second-year students and to first-year students in their second semesters.

Since its inception, the Brooklyn College Master of Fine Arts Program in Poetry has balanced a firm grounding in the history and tradition of the craft with cutting-edge experimental writing. Moderately priced and highly selective, this two-year program offers intensive workshops (limited to ten students), private tutorials, and courses in the history and craft of the genre.

The play writing program at Brooklyn College was started over thirty years ago by Jack Gelber, one of America’s most important experimental writers. The current director of the program, Mac Wellman is endeavoring to continue that tradition, while seeking to embrace the widest definition of that concept.
The play writing program is dedicated to the proposition that writing for the theater is not a business of finished thought and dead rules. Rather, we endeavor to pursue kinds of writing that involve an ongoing conversation with theater of the past and (hopefully) the future. To this end we encourage our MFA playwrights to become students of the theater in every sense: to follow the current scene as well as studying the classics from as many traditions as possible; to study the techniques of making theater as well as theory; and lastly, to become as well read as possible in all the written arts, with special emphasis on what is most contemporary, most challenging, most alive. It is our conviction that each generation must reinvent a theater appropriate to the times; a theater the times deserves; a theater that refuses to settle for the merely tendencious, and the dreary dead hand of the already known.

MFA Program Profile: Texas State University - San Marcos

Contact:

Tom Grimes, MFA Director
Department of English
Texas State University
601 University Drive
San Marcos, TX 78666

Phone: (512) 245-2163
Email: mfinearts@txstate.edu
Web Site: www.english.swt.edu/MFA/
Program Length: 3 Years
Residency: Traditional
School Funding: Public
Admissions Basis: Application, transcripts, portfolio, three letters of recommendation
Programs: Fiction, poetry

Costs:
2004-2005
In State Tuition and Fees: $ 2,489.00
Out-of-State Tuition and Fees $5,585.00

Financial Aid, scholarships and teaching assistant positions available

Key Faculty:

Cyrus Cassells
Poetry

Dagoberto Gilb
Fiction

Tom Grimes
Fiction

Roger Jones
Poetry

Debra Monroe
Fiction

Kathleen Peirce
Poetry

Steve Wilson
Poetry

Their Program Description:

Many writers question the benefits of a writing program. Here at Texas State, we feel that the greatest advantage in attending a program is being in a community of writers. For three years, your work will receive the most careful readings possible by your peers, a distinguished and widely published faculty, and by a noted adjunct faculty member who reads and responds to your finished thesis. In addition, students are made aware of publishing opportunities that might otherwise require extensive research, and they meet, in addition to permanent faculty, another 12-18 visiting writers during their three years in the program.

We are perhaps the most unique program in the country, given our distinguished faculty, our outreach to kids and the community through the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center, our visiting writers series, and our Adjunct Thesis Faculty.

In 2003, the program enrolled fifty-five students, eighty percent of whom were from out of state. Thirty MFA students currently hold TA positions, and another 18 hold IA positions. A number of our students secure teaching jobs each year as they graduate from the program. We regularly nominate fiction and poetry students for national prizes, and recommend fiction manuscripts to literary agents. Each summer, MFA students teach creative writing classes to high school students through the Katherine Anne Porter Young Writers Program. Visiting writers give readings and many hold workshops for MFA students at the house.

Our program requires 48 credit hours, including 12 hours of workshops, 15 hours of literature, 3 hours of form and theory, 3 hours of the analysis of literary techniques, 9 hours in a minor, and 6 hours of thesis. In addition, students must pass a comprehensive examination.

We’ve already had a major impact on the vision of creative writing programs in the 21st century. We hope you’ll come join us and be a part of our future.

MFA Program Profile: University of Oregon

Contact:

Creative Writing Program
5243 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-5243

Phone: (541) 346-3944
Email: crwrweb@darkwing.uoregon.edu
Web Site: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~crwrweb/mfa.htm
Program Length: 2 Years
Residency: Traditional
School Funding: Public
Admissions Basis: Application, transcripts, personal statement, manuscript, three letters of recommendation
Programs: Fiction, poetry

Costs:

Tuition
Resident $9,868
Nonresident $14,167

Housing & meal plan
$6,900

Key Faculty:

David Bradley
Associate Professor
Fiction

Laurie Lynn Drummond
Assistant Professor
Fiction

Karen Ford
Associate Professor
of English

Ehud Havazelet
Associate Professor
Fiction

Garrett Hongo
Professor
Poetry

Dorianne Laux
Associate Professor
Poetry

Robert Hill Long
Senior Instructor
Poetry and Fiction

Pimone Triplett
Associate Professor
Poetry

Their Program Description:

The central emphasis of our program is the act of writing, undertaken here in the context of a community of committed practitioners.

Established in the 1960s by James B. Hall, the University of Oregon’s M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing is one of the longest standing in the country. Originally, Hall designed the program so that the writing workshop would be complemented with graduate courses in literature and other artistic disciplines. Under subsequent directors Ralph Salisbury and John Haislip, the program grew to emphasize more individual attention in conference hours and moved away from the complementary classes in other fields. On his arrival in 1989, former director Garrett Hongo examined the curriculum and graduate requirements, then redesigned the program along studio lines, emphasizing workshop hours and writing time. At present, the curriculum continues to stress the writing workshop, integrating it with seminars and individualized research on craft, theory, and related topics.

The program structure privileges the writing workshop itself, recognizing the need for students to spend a majority of their time writing. The structure emphasizes performance and productivity as the student’s primary responsibilities: Half the required 72 credit hours accrued in this two-year M.F.A. program are in the writing workshop. Conference and thesis work accounts for another quarter of total credit hours, and the remainder consists of seminars. Program faculty have developed a group of literary craft seminars in fiction and poetry that focus on style, form, and literary tradition. Together, the workshops and craft seminars make for a program that combines a strong and exciting component of literary study with a primary focus on the act of writing poetry and fiction. Students take six graduate workshops (in a single genre) in six consecutive academic quarters of residence.

We’ve managed to keep our workshops small, and they have achieved a history of accomplishment, innovation, and quality. In addition, many applicants are attracted to the Pacific Northwest because of the great natural beauties of the region (the Oregon coast, the Cascades, and wild rivers are all close at hand) and because of Eugene’s reputation for social tolerance and support of the arts.

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