Technical writer: technical skills or writing skills?
I'm trying to figure out which degree is most important for technical writers: a technical related degree or an english degree? I have a bit of a technical background, and I've had people tell me I'm a good writer.
The problem is that I'm a fourth year in college (yes, that's right - four years and just now deciding to change my career path). I was going to go into psychology, so I have a lot of psychology courses with about three programming courses, but only two english composition courses.
I don't like the idea of going for a bachelors of english because I've always thought of english classes in college as being very subjective with their grading, as opposed to tech classes which are more objective (either you do it correctly or not).
Any advice on best degrees for technical writers?
Subjective and objective is a false dichotomy here. It's really about the needs of your end-user.
For hardware and complex, deep software an EE or CS person who has good writing skills would do better. Here, the need tilts toward completeness. Programming skills come into play too because in some cases you'll be called upon to use tools to automate the process (e.g., make, perl scripting, LXR, etc.) Your audience is other EE/CS people so they tend to care less about style or pedagogy.
For some software and end-user literature a BA in English would be preferable because the emphasis will be on organizing and simplifying concepts and using multiple ways to convey them: pedagogy matters here. Don't kid yourself, it's still objective problem-solving. From a writing standpoint these kind of docs are actually more challenging because you're trying to say more with less. You also need additional skills in graphics, typesetting, layout style and so forth.
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