Résumé for Howard Silcock MSc, PhD

As a technical writer and documentation consultant, I am committed to delivering high-quality documentation that communicates clearly and directly to the intended audience, conforms to professional standards, and meets agreed-on deadlines. I have more than thirteen years’ experience of technical writing, which has involved:

• producing user and maintenance manuals, specification documents, tender documents and promotional material relating to both hardware and software
• producing on-line documentation (incl. Windows Help files) and World Wide Web material (HTML documents), using Cascading Style Sheets and scripting
• extracting material from diverse sources, using interviews, engineering documents, drawings, etc., and organising it clearly to meet readers’ needs
• working both individually and closely with a team to meet common goals and achieve a uniform presentation
• producing complex graphics (drawings, screen shots, etc.) and spreadsheets and incorporating them in documents
• working with a variety of word-processing packages, making full use of templates and macros to incorporate automatic numbering, indexes, cross-references, mathematical equations, etc., and creating custom environments to ensure that documents adhere to company standards.

In the programming arena, I have extensive experience working with Microsoft Office products and customising them to user requirements, using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and earlier macro languages. Projects I have worked on for clients have included:

• Design and implementation of dialog-based user front ends for Excel-based and Access-based software, including:

• project costing software
• an automatic pie-chart generation system handling data sets containing more than 27,000 records
• an on-line buyer’s guide
• a Diskette Form Lodgement System
• Overseas Property Management software.

• A custom environment for producing company documents, using templates and macros to ensure a uniform presentation and to track documents’ status
• Managing allocations of funding to ACT schools using advanced Excel techniques to implement a complex model allowing tracking of schools’ entitlements and providing for an audit trail.

As a mathematician, my experience includes work as an Experimental Scientist for CSIRO and more recently as a Research Scientist at the Australian National University, providing both mathematical and programming expertise.