How to Land a Career in Technical Writing:

Ms. Whitlock is now A.B.D. in English and a full-time staff member at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, where she writes Web site content, training materials, documentation that allows departments to maintain their own Web sites, course handouts, and academic computing-policy statements. Her job draws on several skills she gained in graduate school including "problem-solving, making information accessible, ordering ideas, researching, sounding authoritative even when you don't feel it, focusing for a long time on a single task, working under pressure, making deadlines." Like Ms. Whitlock, other humanities A.B.D.'s and Ph.D.'s are making careers in technical and medical communication. These fields offer good pay, a strong job market with the probability of continued growth, and plenty of opportunity to learn new things. <snip>

"The reading, thinking, and writing required of graduate students in the humanities can serve them well in a technical environment," he says. "Teaching experience is also helpful. It's common for technical writers to be asked to help develop and deliver training."

So, perhaps I should go for that Master's after all. I don't really know how to decide something like this. I have wanted to be a professor for so long, and part of me thinks that I'm just writing it off when it's still possible—I mean, maybe I could get an amazing teaching job in Toronto. But, probably not, so is it worth the extra seven years of grad school? But I would like to do a Master's thesis—a discourse analysis of sex education materials used in Canada, perhaps just Ontario.

One of my friends is starting a Master's at York in September and they're throwing money at her left, right and centre -- $11 000 so far for a $6 000/year program. I'm almost 100% certain I could get a teaching assistant job if I were in the Theoretical Linguistics MA (especially since there are no LING PhDs to compete with and the profs know and like me), and that's a surprisingly decent chunk of change. So, presumably, I could do an M.A. without incurring any more debt. I wouldn't be living extravagantly, but I also wouldn't be owing anything more OR having to start pay back my OSAP as long as I'm still in school.

But then I reflect on how I'll be 25 when I finish my BA, and if I do a Master's, I'll be 27 when I finish that, and then if I went for a year of college, that would put me at 28... Of course, I've had friends who sucked it up and went back to college at 28 after being out of school for years, so I know it's not that big of a deal. I guess I just don't want to be paying my student loans FOREVER. It would be nice to start making money at some point.

Then there's the whole graduate school versus college tension. I'll admit it, the thought of going from university to college feels like a step down. I know that it's not, I know that college is just as good as university, and in some cases, much better, but there is still the glorification of academia and graduate school and all of that. I have felt less comfortable with academia lately because I wonder how much of an impact it has on the rest of the world (at least when it comes to the humanities and social sciences). I mean, it's great to write about how our language recreates and contributes to discrimination against women (for example), but if the only people who read about it are Women's Studies students, aren't we just preaching to the choir? Being in lingustics, it's part of my discipline to pay attention to how language is used to exclude people, and I see academic language as unnecessarily complex in certain instances in order to divide the world into categories of "educated" and "non-educated"—if you can understand and use the terminology, you have a half-chance of participating in the dialogue. (I find it easy to speak academia-ese, so maybe that's one reason why it's so hard to let it go. I can fit in the group quite easily.) On the other hand, that terminology is often rich and conveys ideas that are not found elsewhere. It becomes difficult to talk about ekstasis and discourses without that vocabulary.

Maybe that's why technical writing is attractive to me. It is basically a job in which you take a complex set of information and set it out in a simple, ordered way that makes it clear to anyone, regardless of background. I can see how my Linguistics background could contribute to that, especially by making me sensitive to gate-keeping* (bah, more terminology).

In any event, I'm glad I have another year to think about this.

*Gate-keeping: This term is used in Linguistics to refer to verbal encounters designed to screen people and determine whether or not to grant access to your group. Job interviews are an excellent example of this, but there are many situations in which this happens. One's accent, vocabulary, decision whether to swear or not, tone of voice, body language, choice of clothing (this can be seen as a type of language in some situations), all of these things can contribute to such decisions.