I am one of those rare individuals who love and am even passionate about technical writing for consumer-based products. My overall goal in the material I produce is first and foremost to keep the end-user safe from what could be a potentially harmful product if misused. Other major concerns would be to clarify the assembly, operation, or maintenance of a particular product.

From childhood, I have always had a curiosity to know how mechanical things work and how they are assembled. In high school, I excelled in all of their vocational courses, including small engine repair, electronics, metalworking, foundry, woodworking, printing, photography, and drafting. Little did I know then that exposure to those four years of vocational classes would serve as a foundation for my technical writing career.

The first part of my working career started in a machine shop where I was exposed to metal cutting machines such as lathes, mills, drills, and saws. The shop also had a variety of metal forming machines like brake presses, shears, and punches, which I operated. As with any small shop, a person is rarely confined to just one area,  so I was also trained for spray painting and welding.

The next phase of life took me into a four-year machine repair apprenticeship at Caterpillar. This training provided a wide range of training in the machine shop, tool design, purchasing, time study, and many other departments. My entire training was, however, focused on repairing the vast variety of machinery within the East Peoria, Illinois manufacturing plant.

An economic downturn in 1982 started my real journey to becoming a full-time technical writer working on various projects, one of which was for off-highway mining trucks produced by Komatsu. Fast forward another eight years, and I was ready to venture into starting my own company. Growing the business to as many as ten employees at one point, I sold the company in 2018 and began to transition into helping others develop their craft as technical writers. 

Over the past four decades, I have literally created thousands of manuals, procedures, training instructions, and technical papers. I am incredibly gifted with a mechanically-minded nature and the ability to quickly understand how things work. This ability has served me well as I work with both a company’s engineering and marketing departments to produce their documentation.