Re-engineering and you: the new kids on the block are the hourly workers and they're writing your documents

Abstract

With such changes in the workplace as teaming, downsizing, and flattening of the management hierarchy, workers have acquired new responsibilities, including those involving written communication. Hourly workers are now writing job procedures, training manuals and tapes, incident reports, observation reports, and change proposals. Workers' assumption of the responsibility for these documents provides new opportunities for professional technical writers, including editing the documents these workers write, training these employees to write effectively, interpreting for nontechnical readers the documents written by these workers, and writing and designing a broad range of documents in a wide variety of genres and media.