Member Profile: Lynn Gottlieb, STC Senior Member

Occupation: Engineer and Technical Communicator

With the exception of a small amount of metabolic water formed during cellular production of biological energy, Earth has all of the water it ever had or will have. Twelve to fourteen feet of it falls annually in the rain forest near Lynn’s home in Washington state.

Her modest urban Seattle home is the perfect staging place for her forays into a world she views with the eye of an engineer. She marvels at nature’s ability to perfect and preserve itself with its own laws. Given the rich soil, high humidity, and year ‘round cool temperature, she reaps sweet rewards from the berry bushes and flower bulbs she nurtures in her back yard. Seattle’s persistent cloud cover has a reputation for casting gloom citywide. In contrast, Lynn welcomes it. Not only does it help regulate the temperature, but it also provides nocturnal illumination and ambience: “It never gets entirely dark here,” she says.

Knowledge is something for which Lynn has an insatiable appetite. She has always wanted to know about everything “so I could know to ask the right questions.” Her lifelong aptitude for mathematics and science piqued an early interest in 18th and 19th century Renaissance. Through her activities as Renaissance Woman, she found herself among others who are “curious by nature,” and “willing to work,” she says. The key force behind her involvement among educated people is that “it helps keep you young.”

Lynn obtained her Master’s degree in engineering at an age which her classmates would not see for twenty or more years. Her keen and endless desire to observe and analyze, combined with her engineering background, leads to a scientific approach to technical writing.

She hesitates to mention technical writing and quality in conjunction with each other. The quantifiable elements of a product, she explains, can be controlled through formulation. Step-action tables, she says, can be controlled. And she points out that “… how to write” is not scientific and cannot be controlled because it is “creative.” Even a typographical error, she explains, can trump the metrics, making a document useless because it occurs in the creative phase.

“Documentation gets short shrift,” she says, because everyone thinks anybody can write. “It’s shameful not to [be able to write].” Lynn puzzles over the concept, and wonders: Why it is acceptable for a person to admit possession of, or lack of artistic talent, while it is a stigma to admit lack of writing talent?

Friends and family occasionally convince Lynn to travel to the southwest. Ever the winter person, she obliges and briefly takes advantage of the visit to observe the unique desert lifestyle and architecture. Famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s (FLW) southwestern structures have strong appeal to Lynn – so much so, that she is a member of a FLW society.

When her figurative internal hygrometer indicator edges into the yellow zone, she goes back to the “big, green, and gray” Pacific northwest. Her house cat missed the dog, and the dog missed Lynn. Together, they go see how big the berries grew and marvel at the increased volume of her ferns and fragrant fuchsias. She has not had a television since the days when they still had UHF knobs. She prefers an evening walk to the dog park where they socialize. Upon return to the house, she and her pets might listen to jazz music while she reads the newspaper, bringing each day to a gentle close.