By Brooke Wayne
Brooke Wayne in her natural element, writing away. Credit: Bettina Bolgar
Ever since I was young, I’ve been obsessed with getting complete information. Being born with bilateral profound hearing loss to two Deaf parents and having one hard of hearing sister meant a life of constant misunderstandings and questions. This lifelong pursuit for information would end up making me an expert in communication and lead me to my career in technical writing.
Exploring Alternative Forms of Communication
This quest for information began as soon as I was born. My parents, who were also Deaf, had experienced so much adversity themselves. There was no hesitation in raising my sister and me in both the Deaf and hearing worlds if it meant better chances for success.
As a result, I was given hearing aids as a newborn. Next, I had speech therapy sessions to learn how to hear, speak, and read lips. I was also encouraged to learn my parents’ primary language, American Sign Language (ASL), which certainly came in handy around the kitchen table. My parents made sure that we knew about cochlear implants (CI), a medical device that bypasses the damaged inner ear by simulating the auditory nerve directly to provide a greater range of hearing sensitivity. They left the decision of getting a CI up to us. Although I was happy with my hearing aids at the time, I changed my mind in my 20s and got one then. Suffice it to say, I had a lot of options to help me communicate with others.
Despite all the tools and resources I had at hand, I was losing information every time it was verbally communicated to me—like water through a sieve. It was especially frustrating during school, and I loathed having to rely on others to fill in the gaps. Copying the smartest kid’s class notes wasn’t enough; their notes were a summarized version of the complete information they had heard. Using a frequency modulation (FM) system to make the noisy environment clearer was useless; I was too reliant on lipreading (speechreading), so no increase in sound and clarity would fill in the information gaps.
It was no surprise that I preferred visual learning, and that evolved into a love of reading and writing. With all the information captured in words, I could read instead of fail to hear. Between closed captions on the TV and a never-ending supply of books, my reading speed and vocabulary rapidly surpassed that of my peers.
In the meantime, my appreciation for ASL as a visual language grew while I attempted to converse in sign with my parents, their Deaf friends, and a few Deaf friends of my own. This blended upbringing was incredibly valuable; it taught me that information could be conveyed in myriad ways, and each method had its own pros and cons.
I found beauty and diversity in the written word, from Shakespeare to an argumentative essay and everything in between, but also in the body language and spatial awareness of sign language. I wouldn’t realize it until many years later, but seeking alternative forms of communication through writing and ASL shaped my versatility as a technical writer.
Finding the Right Accommodations
As I got older, parts of my education continued to suffer from loss of information. There was only so much I could learn from books in certain subjects when so much of it was still being taught verbally. With the help of some incredible hearing resource teachers, a lot of petitioning on my part (including one persuasive speech to representatives at the Toronto District School Board), I was able to secure funding for a pilot of communication access realtime translation (CART) accommodations. In this pilot, a contractor with exemplary typing speed sat down next to me with their laptop, capturing all spoken speech into text that I could read in real time. It was my very own live closed captioning in the real world, and it blew my mind how much verbally communicated information I was missing out on.
The pilot was so successful that the CART accommodations extended into high school for some of my core classes. My grades shot through the roof and awards started trickling in. Thanks to government bursaries and grants covering the expenses, I continued to utilize CART accommodations in my post-secondary education at Ontario College of Art & Design University. Advances in screen-sharing apps also gave me back some independence because I could sit wherever I wanted in class, while still being able to see my notetakers’ transcribed text appear on my screen.
It also allowed me to practice a core skill that I was behind on: how to write my own notes. After every class, my notetaker would email me their notes—anywhere from 15 to 30 pages—for me to keep and use as I saw fit. I would take those original transcripts, quickly reread them, and rewrite my own separate notes containing only the salient information. Later, I would use my very own notes for studying and referencing. Better late than never—here I was, finally learning note-taking.
This, along with attending an arts university, also taught me how to explain creative works by communicating abstract ideas into clear and tangible terms, as well as developing my critical thinking and analysis skills. Without meaning to, I had learned how to extract important information from large swaths of documentation and how to communicate in an accessible manner—key skills in technical writing.
Improving Documentation for Others
It wasn’t until many years post-university that I realized I had a passion for information, and that I could turn it into a career. During my job as a customer support specialist for FreshBooks, I realized I wasn’t the only one struggling with access to information during onboarding.
Our support documentation was out of date, inaccurate, and disorganized. I had to depend on my colleagues through messaging them on Slack or shoulder-tapping them in person. I felt like I was reliving my childhood and having to rely on others for information, except it wasn’t just happening to me. This continued to bother me during my years in the role, where my product knowledge continued to grow and my communication and writing skills improved with every customer support email. My emails were often used as positive examples for new hires. My product knowledge grew to the point where people who had worked there longer than I had were asking me the questions instead.
When my team lead asked me the inevitable question of where I saw myself in a few years, I knew I didn’t want to become a people manager or move into a higher tier of support. It was through many months of brainstorming that I realized there was no dedicated owner for support documentation and my passion for writing made me a natural fit. I seized the opportunity, taking on technical writing as a side project while still working the job I was hired for.
I eventually amassed enough qualitative and quantitative data to pitch a brand new, full-time role for myself: managing documentation. With my fast reading and comprehension skills, I could synthesize information rapidly and communicate it in an accessible manner. I was already a technical writer without realizing it, and thankfully FreshBooks leadership decided to take a chance and make it official.
Wayne shares this conversation with a colleague.
The Journey Never Ends
Currently as a program manager of communications, I develop simple and fast access to accurate product information, and reduce support load by improving self-service resources for customers. In other words, I take complex information and rewrite it to make the information more accessible for others. After all, what better person to write thorough and accessible documentation than someone who’s had to rely on others’ notes their whole life? I knew how frustrating it was to not have all the information at hand, and to have to rely on others to capture that information in other ways for me.
In a way, my hearing loss forced me to acquire skills and experiences which turned out to be vital to my ambition for a career in technical writing. It gave me the ability to flex into various writing styles, the ability to synthesize dense information, and the ability to explain concepts clearly, along with the empathy required to understand the barriers in accessing information.
All of this would not have been possible without access to the tools, accommodations, and allies that helped advocate for me along the way. Some days, my being hard of hearing makes it difficult to do my job, and other days, it makes me better at my job because of what I’ve learned from it. But no matter what, I always look forward to writing and wrangling information every day.
Brooke Wayne lives in Toronto, Ontario, and created her own job as FreshBooks’ first-ever technical writer. For more of her writings, conference talks, and artwork, or to reach out, see brookewayne.com. This appeared in the Spring 2022 issue of Hearing Health magazine. Read her sister’s story, “From Reading Faces to Publishing Research,” here.
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