by Virginia Janzig 

I attended the STC Summit for the first time in about 10 years. In addition to being a presenter in the Editing Progression, I attended many of the sessions that were offered, and spent worthwhile time in the vendor showcase, especially the bookstore.

Three things stand out to me.

First, the organizers had clearly paid attention to the comments received about prior conferences. The conference was more focused on writing and editing, and much less on tools. And the variety of different kinds of writing topics was tremendous: everything from processes and procedures and structured language to highly technical online documentation.

Having recently taken a job in a courseware development group, an area about which I know very little, I was pleased to find more than one session on instructional design. The two I attended were quite helpful.

The editing progression had several presenters on a wide range of topics, and it was well attended. A couple of other sessions on language were also well attended and useful, as well as entertaining. And our language is nothing if not entertaining.

Second, several sessions on various topics provided information for both beginning and advanced writers. Assessing an audience and its needs is always a challenging task, but I think that the organizers and presenters did an excellent job of delivering to both ends of the spectrum.

Third, I was especially glad to see sessions on careers, not only what kinds of careers are available in the technical documentation arena, but also how to progress in a career: what opportunities to look for, how to build skills, and how to present yourself (not just your resume) in a professional and business-like manner.

The Minneapolis Convention Center was a great venue, and the city had a lot to offer. There were plenty of rooms for all of the sessions (although a few of the most popular were standing room only), and the vendor showcase area had refreshments and Internet access. The incredible walkways made it really easy to get from hotels to the convention center and to lots of other businesses.

In closing, I was pleased to see how many young people attended the conference. Clearly, technical documentation is perceived as a legitimate career and career path, and, if we can help persuade the U.S. Department of Labor to update its definition of this job, then I think that the STC and technical documentation as a whole will benefit, and the technical community will be well served.

by Meredith Kinder

From May 14 – 16, 2007, I attended the 54^th Annual Conference of the STC (Society of Technical Communication) in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At the Lone Writer SIG (Special Interest Group) progression session titled “Out of the Solitudes: Progressions of STC’s Lone Writer Community,” Jerry Franklin led a discussion on the essentials of self-editing documentation. The following is the checklist he suggests using when self-editing.

Put distance between you and the document. If you have a long deadline, take a day or two without looking at it. If you have a short deadline, take 30 minutes away from it where you don’t look at it or think about it. Watch the Sopranos, swim the English Channel, or work on another project: just put it down for an extended amount of time.

Take on the genre of Mr./Ms. Proofreader. Remove yourself physically to play this role: if you write in an office, take it home. If you write at home, take it to a coffee shop. If you write on screen, print it out, and vice versa. You’re more likely to see errors if you reposition the way you see the text. Furthermore, when proofreading:

• On the first pass, read slowly for cohesiveness.
• On the second pass, proof for formatting.
• On the third pass, read it out loud. Agonize over it. This phase is time-consuming, but absorbing it will increase your changes of finding a typo and errors.

Use a style guide. For best results, use both yours and an industry-style guide or other type of published ones (such as MicroSoft, Chicago, etc.). When you use a style guide, you don’t have to make decisions while editing—they have already been made for you. A style guide saves you time in the end.

Rely on other sources. Look at what industry leaders are doing. If you are in software, look at what Oracle is doing. If you are a small shop, make your documents look like the big guys.

Have non-SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) review your document. Others in your company can give a different perspective from someone who is not down in the details. Since non-SMEs should probably not be a techies, they’re likely to approach it from an editorial standpoint. Even if not all of their feedback is useful, they will find some good nuggets for you. So how do you persuade  non-SMEs to help you out? Have a document review day/morning with cookies and colored pens and bring in hard-copy documentation. Let them read and mark it up.

Take advantage of free or cheap assistance. Students are hungry for real world experience, and will do good work for $15/.hr. Editing or proofreading gives them experience and items to put on their resume. This approach will require managing and a small time commitment, but it could be worth it in the end.

My last plea and request for assistance worked so well (audio editing expertise materialized), I thought I’d try again!

We are really enjoying our new blog, which is presented with WordPress, but we would like to play around with the look and feel of the site and the blog.  This requires some CSS experience, or at least comfort with working with CSS in the WordPress environment.

This task might be as simple as finding the appropriate existing theme within WordPress for us to use, it might be as simple as tweaking the theme that we are using now, or it might be completely revamping and designing our own theme that we want.

Please contact me at corbinm@us.ibm.com if you are interested in helping us improve the look and feel of our WordPress-based Web site and blog.

a general impression of a journal article
by Michelle Corbin

I recently re-read the journal article “The Technical Editor as Diplomat:  Linguistic Strategies for Balancing Clarity and Politeness” by Mackiewicz and Riley (Technical Communication, Volume 50, Number 1, February 2003, pp. 83-94).  This article discusses 8 different strategies, based on linguistics research, for balancing clarity and politeness when making editing comments, in the hopes of building and enhancing the author-editor relationship.  Although I do not agree with all of the strategies and conclusions that the authors make, I did find it a fascinating article – one that made me actually think about and try to articulate my own thoughts on the role that politeness plays when I make my editing comments. 

Although this is not a recently published article, I thought it might be nice to use it to kick off this new type of newsletter article in the Technical Editing SIG blog/newsletter.  We receive so much information that it is difficult to know what to take the time to read, and the SIG is trying to help you make a decision as to whether to read an article or not – we want to entice and encourage you to read these articles (and who knows, maybe join a conversation about them on the blog or in our discussion list!). 

Do you remember reading this article?  Did this entice you into reading it (or re-reading it)?  Do you have some thoughts about this article?  Please consider sharing them on our blog or as part of our discussion list (I decided to cross-post this to both places, in hopes of encouraging cross-reading/cross-participation in our blog and discussion lists.  ).