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Show 64 "The f i r s t day I was pretty apprehensive," Karen says, "because I'd never before had a job vihere I needed to perform i n t e l l e c t u a l ly rather than just digging a t r a i l or supervising kids. My boss handed me an a r t i c l e and said, 'Abstract t h i s , and vihen you get through I ' ll tell you whether you've done i t r i g h t . ' " For hours Karen sat there reading the document and wondering vihat she was supposed to do with i t. Weeks passed before she began to understand the difference between literary writing and technical viriting. Her supervisor had been trained as a journalist, and vias used to condensing a lot of information into a short space. But as a former English major, Karen had studied l i t e r a t u r e. "My problem," she says, "was that I vianted a l l my work to sound like a great masterpiece. In abstracting, you don't flower up the language with phrases like 'the miracle of modern computers.' You just say 'computers' and l e t it go at that. I thought I vias being creative, using lots of adjectives and sentences that viere four lines long." Her boss vias patient, and within three months Karen could read a document and virite vihat vias important about i t . The documents viere articles from journals written by professionals concerned viith fire suppressions foresters, fire fighters, and university researchers. Just as Karen vias getting good at abstracting, she was changed to another phase of the work. The information stored in the computer had been l i s t e d under random key words - viords vihich viere to be fed into the computer to retrieve the information. Documents about f i r e retardants, for example, might be indexed under "chemical f i r e suppressants", under "fire retarding |