When I attended Colorado State University (CSU) many moons ago, I chose the ‘Journalism and Technical Communications’ (J&TC) major because I intended to transfer my electronics technician knowledge into writing usable documents—the ones I’d used in the Navy were obviously written by engineers speaking Engineering, not Technician. That career path began in my second command in which I learned to write not only updated and simplified calibration procedures, I also helped install and write the user, repair, and admin manuals for the very first local area network (LAN) laid in the divisional spaces.

That was my first exposure to technical writing. After separating from the US Navy, I later found employment with high-tech companies along the Front Range and began documenting the repair procedures I used to trace faults in post-production motherboards. When management learned about it, the boss asked me to write up the up and coming ISO-9000 quality control documents for the various repair teams.

So began my foray into Technical Writing.

As a Journalism major, I was offered the opportunity to work on the CSU newspaper, The Rocky Mountain Collegian (https://collegian.com/). I took to copy-editing test and passed, then worked for the paper for the next two-and-a-half years. First as a copy editor, then as Managing Editor, finally as a weekly columnist.

I would link to the issues I was involved in, but on July 28, 1997, the Spring Creek Flood (https://history.fcgov.com/explore/flood) swamped buildings on the CSU campus, including the offices of The Rocky Mountain Collegian, leading to the loss of a decade or more of back issues.

Luckily, I have at least one bin full of issues from a part of that era. I’ve reached out to the Collegian editing staff asking if they’re interested in my collection on loan to enter the issues in the Library Archives for the paper. I hope to hear back soon. I’ll let you know what I hear back.

In the meantime, I’ll peruse old issues, reminisce about my university days, and doubtless transcribe some of my articles, updated for today’s audience. If you read my quotes, you already know that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Happy reading.