Technical writing in Bengalooru

My technical writing friends in town out did themselves today and set up several very informative visits. First I met Helen and Rakesh Shukla of The Writers Block, a technical communication training and consulting company with offices in the neighborhood of Bengalooru called Domlur. We had a very pleasant and informative visit at their place of business and I was able to meet two of their technical writing instructors and several students as well.


Then I went over to Oracle in Lexington Towers, in Koramangala, another part of Bengalooru, for a larger meeting. We were 30 minutes late arriving. The driver of the car I had hired for the afternoon had for the second time overestimated his knowledge of the streets of Bengalooru. The building was one of those big new glass and marble towers that we have come to expect in IT land. It is one of three Oracle facilities in town. It had the typical security with ID cards and cube-land working atmosphere inside.

I first met with Gururaj, B.S., an experienced technical writer who manages a team of four at Oracle. In addition, he maintains TWIN, the premier India list for technical writers. We visited for about 15 minutes until I needed to prepare for my presentation.

In a comfortable meeting room I spoke to a group of 20 technical writers, about half of whom work at Oracle and the others came in from companies like Intel and FaceTime. The meeting was largely organized through STC; Susan Alexander, one of the STC members, was kind enough to present me with a certificate of appreciation.



The audience had numerous questions, many having to do with the details of Minnesota State's online offerings in technical communication. I also got several more questions about pedagogy, as it turns out that several of the audience not only are practitioners, but also instructors of technical writing. The system in India really is quite different from ours. Here practitioners are instructors and practitioners learn in private institutes like TWB or on the job training.

I would like to thank Kumar Dhanagopal, a principal technical writer at Oracle, for arranging my visit on such short notice.