Hello Everyone,
My name is Shajia Khan . I am a student of Technical Communication, Seneca College, Toronto. From the January 2009 till April 2009 I will have my co-op semester and I am planning to work with Fedora project in the area of documentation writing and editing to gain my co-op experience.
My educational background is basically in English. I have done my bachelors in English language and literature. Then I worked as a news paper reporter for a while and then worked as language teacher in middle school. After that, I did my M.A. in Applied Linguistics from Carleton University, Ottawa. I worked for a linguistic consultant for a company in Calgary for a year. I worked as a teacher in various educational settings. Then I enrolled in Seneca College to make a career change. I am planning to become a technical writer because I believe as a teacher my main object was to convey complex ideas to my students in simple terms. Here as a technical writer I will be doing the same.
I have summed up my experiences and knowledge which will bring result to Fedora project:
My working experience as a writer: I wrote in news paper articles. As a teacher I wrote handouts, course outlines and even teaching units which are very similar to the technical documents.
My experience in editing: As a teacher I had to review my students writing and help them to write in correct English. Moreover the course in Editing and Style in Seneca had brushed up those editing skills and taught me some tools especially on how to edit in an electronic document.
The technical know -how: The technical communication course in Seneca taught me some key concept in documentation. For example, task analysis, user analysis, writing a procedure, technical description, technical specification, software lifecycle etc. It will enable me to be familiarized in the term.
Communication Skills: As I mentioned earlier, as a teacher my key responsibility was to explain complex ideas into simple terms. I believe that is very crucial when someone works as a technical writer.
I will be able to work full time for Fedora, so I am looking for lots and lots of works!
Regards
Shajia
On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 11:16:25AM -0500, Shajia Khan wrote:
Hello Everyone,
My name is Shajia Khan . I am a student of Technical Communication, Seneca College, Toronto. From the January 2009 till April 2009 I will have my co-op semester and I am planning to work with Fedora project in the area of documentation writing and editing to gain my co-op experience.
Sorry it took so long to reply, as you may know, we hold Thanksgiving in the US at a very odd time, so some of us got distracted last week and are still recovering. :)
[snip loads of good qualifications ...]
I also am a lit geek and product of writing, journalism, and the like. Very glad to have you here. You might not be surprised to learn that technical projects always have an abundance of technical experts and a dearth of clear communicators.
(Although, to be fair, open source has an unusually high percentage of folks who are clear communicators; it seems to come with the territory -- always a few with liberal arts experience.[1])
I will be able to work full time for Fedora, so I am looking for lots and lots of works
Then I hope we can respond fast enough. :) What is happening right now, everyone with useful knowledge trapped in the brain is working quickly and diligently through the month of December to greatly improve the Docs Project process content. How and where to get involved should become much clearer. It will help pages such as these make better sense:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs_Project_tasks#Content_tasks https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs_Project_tasks_for_students
Those do a need an update since the Fedora 10 release.
Highlights:
* Most of our longer guides need lead writers -- people committed to working on them and seeing them through to published.
* Following the release-related content (Release Notes, Installation Guide), we have an opportunity to focus on:
- Fedora User Guide - end-user help document needing update to Fedora 9 and Fedora 10 - Fedora Packaging Guidelines - reorg and rewrite - Fedora Deployment Guide - big - Fedora Security Guide - in progress - Fedora Common Services Infrastructure (CSI) Guide - in progress
That list is ordered by in increasing difficulty of technical knowledge useful or required. Anyone new(er) to Linux/UNIX is probably best served starting at the top and working downward. The exception is in the area of wordsmithing -- we can all always use a good editor, and share that workload with each other.
- Karsten
[1] Great article on the reason technical teams always have a "Russian Lit Major" (person with liberal arts education v. computer science or math)
http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2006/09/06/russian_history.html
docs@lists.stg.fedoraproject.org
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Karsten Wade -
Shajia Khan