I've always loved love writing. I hated English class in school because I thought, and still do, the teachers were, let's say, less than adequate to their jobs and more than a little blinkered about the world. But then, that was Oklahoma. Any way, I never planned on being a technical writer. I wrote short stories and screen plays and shopped them all around. I used to have a huge stack of rejection letters but I finally threw them away. But, because I could roughly string together an approximation of a sentence in English, I was frequently called on to write up processes, training and other technical documents. Then one day, I tried submitting a description of a process to SSWUG. They paid me money! Steve emailed to ask me to write here. I've never been back to that other place since.

I'm with Jeff. It's a great opportunity for learning when you write articles. You have to, or should anyway, think through your thoughts and processes and get them in order and structured correctly. It is a lot like writing code.

One more thought, if you get stuff wrong, your peers are very supportive. They will point out exactly where you went wrong in great reems of detail. I'm just thankful when they don't question my lineage.