In this episode, I talk with Sharon Burton, a technical content strategist who has taught technical communication to engineering students at the University of California, Riverside, for 22 years and edited the book Women in Technical Communication. We talk about how a $10-an-hour job writing computer manuals took her from cultural anthropology into a field that gave her permission to be curious, how a scam anthology and a friend’s terminal cancer diagnosis led to the book, why the people who did the work should tell the history of technology themselves, and how she used AI to write the Google Drive scripts that kept dozens of contributors’ stories organized.

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Sharon and I start with how she fell into tech writing in the early 1990s as a single mom and cultural anthropology graduate student, when someone she knew in the computer science department mentioned a company that needed computer manuals written for $10 an hour. We talk about why she can teach writing but not curiosity, why breaking a product on purpose is part of documenting it, and how saying yes to things she didn’t know how to do led to 22 years of teaching at UC Riverside.

The heart of our conversation is Women in Technical Communication, the book Sharon edited. The idea came from a scam anthology that asked contributors to pay $500 and give up their copyright, and her friend Char James-Tanny’s terminal cancer diagnosis made her start it right away. Sharon makes the case that the people who did the work need to tell the history of technology themselves, and that these stories show a field that has always been about change, which makes AI just the latest one.

We spend the second half on how Sharon managed the project. She vibe coded Google Drive scripts with AI to create a private folder and Google Doc for each writer, copied in their submissions, and tracked word counts to show who had made edits. She sent the writers weekly status emails and edited lightly so each woman’s voice stayed her own. Sharon recommends books by Karen Schriver, Susan Weinschenk, and Ginny Redish, and closes with advice someone once gave her, act as if you belong, and the hardest lesson in following it: it’s okay to ask for help.

Sharon Burton is a technical content strategist, educator, author, and editor based in Riverside, California. She has taught technical communication to engineering students at the University of California, Riverside, for 22 years, and she edited “Women in Technical Communication: From Typewriters to Touchscreens: A History by the Women Who Did the Work” (XML Press). She came to tech writing in the early 1990s from graduate studies in cultural anthropology.

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