A pediatrician. I thought only the US had mob rule. We've got it now.
I've come to the opinion that Lincoln should have let the South secede.
Eventually a slave-based economy would have collapsed, they would have
had to establish trade relations with the North simply for manufactured
goods. In the American Civil War, the Confederacy had better Generals
but the North had the guns. And Britain & France stayed well away from
choosing up sides. And we might not have lost 620,000 men on both sides.
As for what a friend of mine used to call "edufuckingcation," I had only
one occasion to discuss technical writing in front of a class--when I
gave a sample presentation as part of the interview process for a
professorship at a technical university in South Dakota (grrrr).
Somehow--and I probably stole the idea--I presented tech writing as
ventriloquism. Unlike poetry, fiction, etc., there is no "you." The tech
writer is there solely to transmit information. He or she has no
identifiable voice. Oh, it can be creative, but the purpose is to get
information to the audience, however you define that term for a given
project. The writer pulls the string in the back and the text--the
dummy--does all the talking. Something like that.
That same year, I interviewed at New Jersey Institute of Technology to
teach comp and tech writing. I was emotionally distressed--my mother had
died the week before--and I was a bit too honest. They were interested
in their new hire setting up a Technical Communications program to
supplement the "hard" engineering programs. I was aghast. "Why would you
want to do that?" I asked. Well, that was the end of me at NJIT. I still
see tech writing as glorified ventriloquism; and I proved that a few
years later when I went to work at Morgan Stanley to do a variety of
projects where I simply was not supposed to exist, i.e., there was no
way to identify who committed the brochure or manual. I did okay with
the work; so okay that I was recruited by another firm, Deutsche Bank.
Alas, no trips to Oktoberfest. Or to Canary Wharf--that was on my dance
card if I'd stayed at Morgan.
Anyway....
Ken
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