Holy crap! Is this really how I did/do define myself professionally? Makes the practice of technical writing sound about as exciting as watching rocks mate. Funny in a creepy sort of way.
I stumbled on the video from a post of a post somewhere. The narration immediately brought me back to those old black-and-white movies we used to watch in seventh grade social studies -- the ones of the picturesque summer vistas of Washington DC splashed behind the story of American democracy. There was always something just out of reach in those movies. Something that seemed too perfect to be factual. Listening to the tech writer video, I realized it wasn't the visual story (how could there be anything not real about the Lincoln Memorial?), it was the dude narrating the thing. Too perfect in tone and meter. Too middle America in accent and pronunciation. I guess this assumes that I would have found the movies more compelling if they were narrated by Joe Pesci. I think it says something about place, context, and what we bring to a subject. It's probably something I need to develop more. There's application to so much of what we try to do in the writing classroom tied up in situatedness -- in place and location.
I do find the tech writer clip a bit depressing still.
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