How important is writing in your job?

Hi Rosemaricel,

I work at Naval Reactors, which designs, support, and maintain reactor systems that go into power submarines and aircraft carriers. writing, reading, and talking to people is about 99% of what I do. We have a huge cross-organizational team of experts, each is an expert in a particular area, and it's my job to review everybody's work in form of reports and write a shorter report summarizing what it says, with some additional insights from my experiences working with another group.

The style of writing needs to be both concise and informative. It's almost like a history paper but with more technical content in it.

I did not have to demonstrate my reading, writing abilities at all to get the job. The focus was technical proficiency and demonstration that you have good thinking patterns during the interviews. I had to solve some math, physics, and engineering problems on paper during the interview, and explain to the interviewer how I derived the solution.

I think that writing is really just an extension of your mind, so if you are knowledgable and able to communicate verbally, that's all it takes to be a good technical writer.

-Xiaoyun