This article originally was an online reply to someone declaring Indian Technical Writing as incompetent and advocating that the work should be taken back to the American writers.
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While there are a lot of TW teams in India who are producing quality work and are delivering far beyond their mandate of “writing grammatically correct content,” there are teams in India who have struggled to meet the basic quality standards. Shipping the work back to the American Writers is a knee-jerk reaction (I know a couple of companies where this has been MADE TO HAPPEN successfully.)
I have myself seen some pretty ordinary people in tech-writing in India. I joke with my friends sometimes that people who get shortlisted for tech-writing jobs are the ones devoid of any language skills, clarity of expression, and technical aptitude. While this joke is the reality of 30-40% tech-writing teams in India, it does not mean you cannot find talent in India. The problem lies elsewhere. What ails the badly performing Indian Tech-Writing teams?
I have seen that the following are the main problems:
1) Me no want pay …me no want train
Best Indian Tech-Writers (just like their American counterparts) are not considered for employement by most companies because they are expensive. New people with good potential are never considered cause they will need to be trained. So most companies end up recruiting the wrong people in the right experience range of 2-6 years.
2) Training? What training?
It is very Indian to speak the same thing multiple times for emphasis and respect. It is also Indian to use minimal (sometimes incomplete) and informal communication. And then Indians are influenced by the British – a nation Americans hate for linguistic reasons. We Indians are also taught British English in the school for 12-15 years.
Again, it is a knee jerk reaction to assume that Indians will struggle with these problems lifelong. NIIT, which use to be big in Instructional Designing a decade ago, had designed training programs that transformed hundreds of Indian new writers into thoroughbred American-style writers. The small NIIT language program was a mandatory one for everyone in the company. (Check with a former NIITian about this program or Google for it.)
If you have no patience for training newbies, be more thorough in your recruitment and be willing to pay a little.
3) How fast can you build a tech-writing team?
The speed with which you can build your tech-writing team is directly proportional to how soon you get frustrated and get ready to undo the whole thing (sending work back to the US). We all know how off-shoring is done - Indispensable tech-writers, domain experts, architects, and developers in the US are let go and new teams are built in quick time and are expected to hit the ground running.
I know of a 100 member strong tech-writing team in Bangalore that was recruited in a matter of months (I know this because while the team was being built 37 different headhunters had contacted me for this team in 3-4 months - and I saw many of my teamies also get countless calls from people hiring for this team).
If you go slow, be selective, and think long term, you will increase your chances of success. Too many teams are recruited too fast to succeed.
4) Let them make mistakes and learn
This one is hard. I remember when I was teaching someone driving. Being an experienced driver, I found it very hard to let go of the steering and controls to a newbie. It was dangerous.
Yet I did not assume that my trainee driver will keep driving like a newbie forever. Unfortunately, too many editors and tech-writing managers fail to understand this.
5) Damager may not be an anagram for Manager.. but sometimes, it’s a synonym
In my 12 years as a Technical Writer, I haven’t seen more than a couple of tech-comm managers who knew their …errr… stuff. For the fear of backlash, I will not elaborate on this point further (or maybe I will write a full blog post on the Tech-Writing Damagers). For now, I will mention a two-line Indian folklore that explains the survival of a lot of TW managers:
“There was a demon who use to kill and eat the King on new moon, so the king’s men use to catch a villager and make him the king for THAT one night.”
