Susan Becker Susan Becker is reluctant to state how many years she has worked in the field of writing to improve people’s understanding and use of the stuff that appears on their screens. Technical manuals for FICO (when it was called Fair, Isaac), customer service procedures for Charles Schwab Bank (when it was new), online Help for too many startups to mention (all over the SF Bay Area), UX writing at IBM (for Informix), incomplete sentences. She’s done it all.
Susan is proud of two projects in particular. Her work on the Style Guide for Voting System Documentation, which Susan researched and developed with Dana Chisnell for NIST. Her work at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory on the test procedures for NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which orbits the earth to observe the cosmos using the highest-energy form of light. (That would be, you guessed it, gamma rays!)
Susan started out putting her BA in English literature to use teaching English as a Second Language in an adult education program. After completing an MA in English (Creative Writing) and teaching Freshman English Composition at San Francisco State, she moved into technical writing and grew with the industry. She is now living in the Sierra Nevada foothills, working on a creative nonfiction project. (OK. Sorry. It’s a memoir.)