Technical Editing Special Interest Group of the Society for Technical Communication

The Technical Editing (TE) Special Interest Group (SIG) of the Society for
Technical Communication (STC) fosters excellence in technical communication by
advancing technical editing skills through the sharing of information,
experience, and professional support. Among our goals are to serve as the first
resource on questions of editing for all STC members and to increase awareness
about the value that editing can add to all forms of technical communication

Two Technical Editing SIG Scholarships Available for 2008

The Technical Editing SIG offers two scholarships of $2,000.00 each, the first to assist students who are pursuing an undergraduate degree and the second to assist students who are pursuing a graduate degree in the fields of Technical Communication. Students applying for one of these scholarships are expected to be able to demonstrate their focus on topics related to technical editing through their academic studies, current jobs, special projects, or undergraduate or graduate program. The winners will be announced in the Technical Editing SIG newsletter.

Eligibility

The Technical Editing SIG Scholarship Committee evaluates applicants’ academic records and potential for contributing to the Technical Editing profession. To be eligible for a scholarship, you must be

• Enrolled in a graduate degree or undergraduate degree program in the Technical Communication field
• Pursuing a career as a Technical Editor

Deadline for Application

The Technical Editing SIG is accepting scholarship applications for 2008. The deadline for submission is May 16, 2008. Winners will be notified before the end of June 2008.

To Apply

Download and complete the “STC Technical Editing SIG Scholarship Application for 2008” MS Word form and follow the instructions in the application.

The Technical Editing SIG has nominated and recognized one of its members with the Distinguished SIG Service Award, or DSSA. Started in 2002, this DSSA recognizes exemplary dedication of a member to a SIG and its activities. Three basic criteria are considered in identifying nominees for the DSSA: length of SIG membership, consistency of service over time, and the variety of service.

It should come as no surprise that the Technical Editing SIG chose to recognize Diane Feldman with our DSSA (it was our first opportunity to do so, because you cannot recognize the current manager with the award). Diane has been an STC member for seventeen years and a Technical Editing SIG member for nearly ten years. Diane was the manager for our SIG for seven of those years! Diane led the rechartering of our SIG, secured numerous volunteers, brought new leadership on board, and continues to advise and guide the current SIG leadership. Additionally, as SIGs rose in importance as communities in STC, Diane volunteered to help with one of the first cross-SIG collaborations that helped SIG leaders across-the-board.

Diane will receive a plaque at the annual conference in honor of her recognition. The citation on this plaque will read: “For your exceptional leadership as the Technical Editing SIG manager and your continued mentoring, selfless contributions, and enthusiasm for the SIG and the technical editing profession.” Please join us in recognizingDiane Feldman for all of her past and continued contributions to the Technical Editing SIG. We would not be where we are today without her dedicated service.

The DSSA can be given each year to recognize up to one SIG member for every 1000 SIG members; that is, because the Technical Editing SIG has between 2000 and 3000 members, we can nominate up to three SIG members. Nominations are due by November 30, with the decision made at the DSSA January Board Meeting of STC.

By Lawrence D. “Larry” Kunz

Editor’s Note:  Larry is running for 2nd VP.  He submitted this newsletter article, which describes his views on the major issues facing STC today.  A brief bio and link to more information can be found at the end of this article.

Are you getting value for your investment in STC? Many members, as they renew their memberships for 2008, are asking what value they receive in return for the dues they pay.

I’m pretty well sold on the value of STC. Just last year I got a new job after spotting the opening on my chapter’s employment page. During the interview process, I benefited from the experience I’ve gained through STC and the contacts I’ve made in STC.

But that’s just one person’s experience. STC must offer real value, consistently and across the board, to members and prospective members. STC will need to offer even more value to remain competitive in the next few years.

(Yes, I said “STC” and “remain competitive” in the same sentence. STC is a business, and it confronts significant issues and stiff competition in today’s marketplace. It’s nice to think that STC is more than just a business and that it’ll always be here. But the reality is that, to remain viable in the short term, STC must do better at proving its value.)

Taking a longer view, however, STC has an opportunity to provide value in ways that go far beyond what’s possible today. STC is uniquely positioned to take the lead in defining the profession of technical communication. When we do that, we’ll provide significant and enduring value for our members, for practitioners who haven’t yet become members, for the people who employ us, and even for society in general.

Defining the Profession

Ever since I joined STC 25 years ago, we’ve been saying that technical communication is a profession. But we’re an immature profession, and as a result our work often isn’t taken seriously by the people who employ us and the people who buy our products.

To grow into a mature profession, we need at least two things:

• An agreed-on code of ethics. STC has its own ethical code, but it doesn’t represent the consensus of the entire profession, and it’s not enforceable.
• A unique body of knowledge, and the expectation that each practitioner has mastered that body of knowledge.

The technical communication profession is desperate for leadership – desperate for a set of ethical values, an agreed-on body of knowledge, and perhaps a credentialing system.

Today, all of the pieces are in place for us to develop technical communication into a mature profession. We have the will, we have the know-how, and we have an organization – STC – with the stature, the broad reach, and the resources to lead the way. STC can assemble the building blocks for our profession, it can forge consensus, and it can gain buy-in among the significant stakeholders in the worldwide community of technical communicators.
 
What Is STC Doing?

As a member of the STC board of directors I’m leading the effort to formulate a strategic plan, or roadmap that positions STC as the leader in defining the profession – especially by establishing a body of knowledge and promoting ethical standards. (We’ve already begun working on the body of knowledge.)

You might have heard the phrase telling our powerful story. The strategic plan focuses on raising the profile of all technical communicators – and emphasizing the value we provide to our employers and to the world in general – by marketing our people and the work we do.

The strategic plan also emphasizes establishing and expanding partnerships. By teaming with other organizations, STC will strengthen its leadership role in the profession and position itself to provide even more value to its members.

STC doesn’t need to be fixed. It needs to be modernized. The board of directors, along with the executive director and her staff, understand this. We know that STC must keep providing value over the short term while setting the stage for long-term value by defining the profession. We’re implementing plans to keep the business of STC strong by retaining and attracting members and by constantly reviewing its suite of programs and services to ensure that they still make sense.

I believe that we can find a way to develop technical communication as a profession and continue delivering real value to our members – all without losing the social and interpersonal aspects that have made STC so special to so many people over our history.

What It Means to You

Defining the profession will benefit every technical communicator because it’ll make us more valuable to the people who sign our paychecks. Instead of simply saying “I need some manuals and online helps” (which reduces technical communication to a commodity, not a profession), our employers will realize that they need professional people who contribute value to the organization by increasing customer satisfaction and making products easier to use – thus easier to sell.

We’ll prove our value on a much wider stage as well. By providing information that makes technology work for the people who use it, we contribute real value to society as a whole.

I’m running for second vice-president because nobody is better acquainted with the issues that STC will have to confront as leads the profession to where we want it to go. I can foster a climate of creativity and cooperation in which we’ll plot a course for the Society and the profession. STC needs leaders who can build consensus and explain decisions to the membership at large. I hope you’ll entrust me with your vote.

The next few years will be exciting. Along with my membership dues, I’ve chosen to invest my time and energy in being a part of this effort. I hope you’ll agree that STC’s future, and the value it’ll bring to you, is worth investing in as well.

# # #

Lawrence D. “Larry” Kunz, a candidate for STC second vice-president, is a member of the Society’s board of directors and immediate past president of the Carolina chapter. He is employed as a Senior Technical Writer at Systems Documentation, Inc., in Durham, NC, where he manages a large software documentation project.   To learn more about Larry, check out http://lk81924.googlepages.com/home.

Hi everyone!  I have posted the audio recording of our October 2007 Membership Teleconference call to the Meeting archives page.  Be sure to download the handouts to use while listening to the audio recording.  We had a highly motivating technical program about concision and clarity and the need to reduce the number of words that we use to communicate our technical information.

I posted both a WAV file and an MP3 file.  Our audio guru who edits our recordings created a higher quality, but larger file, in the WAV file.  He also created the smaller MP3 file, but its quality is noticably different.  So, my question to you all is this:  Is 52 MB too large of a file, or does quality always trump file size when working with an audio recording of a meeting?  (Please be patient as you wait for the WAV file to download, as it will take some time, even over a T1 or fast DSL line.)

Thank you to all of you who voted for our officers for next year. In October, the Technical Editing SIG successfully completed our first ever election of officers. The officers for 2008 are

Co-manager: Meredith Kinder

Meredith is a Documentation Specialist at SAS Institute in Cary, North Carolina. The co-manager position is a two-year term (2008-2009). The co-manager is a Society-level SIG manager position, responsible to SIG members, the Society
office, and the STC Board of Directors.

Treasurer: Jeffrey Japp

Jeffrey is a Technical Writer for InterAct Public Safety Systems. He is currently serving as the Technical Editing SIG Treasurer for 2007. The treasurer is a one-year term (2008). The treasurer manages the SIG budget and tracks SIG expenditures.

Secretary: Virginia Janzig

Virginia is a Senior Technical Editor at IBM. She is currently serving as the Technical Editing SIG Secretary for 2007. The secretary is a one-year
term (2008). The secretary is responsible for taking minutes at the quarterly membership meetings and monthly volunteer meetings and for posting the minutes to the Web.

Membership Manager: Kelly Graham

Kelly is an editor at Rockwell Automation, Inc. The membership manager is a one-year term (2008). The membership manager serves as administrator of the discussion list, receives the monthly membership report from the Society offices, and welcomes new and reinstated members.

Congratulations to our new officers!

Hi everyone.  We sent out an eBlast to all the membership with the details, but I just wanted to remind everyone that we have our quarterly membership meeting this Thursday, October 25th.  Here’s a description of the meeting:

http://www.stc-techedit.org/meetings/upcoming-meeting/

You can find materials, handouts, and eventually a recording of the session in our meeting archives:

http://www.stc-techedit.org/meetings/meeting-archives/

Please refer to the e-mail announcement for the details on calling in to our quarterly membership meeting via teleconference call.  If you no longer have that meeting announcement, please contact me (corbinm@us.ibm.com) and I’ll try to help you with the information.

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.

by Michelle Corbin, co-manager 

Hello SIG members!  It’s been a week since I returned home from the Technical Communication Summit, and I have recovered from the time away from the office and I wanted to share a few tidbits from the conference.

We attended leadership day on Sunday, and gathered invaluable information that will help us plan our next set of activities.  I learned a great definition of leadership from incoming president, Linda Oestreich:  “Leadership is the ability to cause others to act in desired ways for the benefit of the organization.”  Ultimately, each community leader was encouraged to determine what we wanted to do from year to year, and then just go do it;  that is, don’t do everything and don’t do what you think you “should” do, but just do what your members want you to do and do what your volunteers sign up to do.  So, Technical Editing SIG members, what do you want us to do? 

We had a very interesting keynote speaker, Simon Singh, who spoke about the making of his documentary about a mathematician solving the proof for an age-old mathematical equation. Although the specifics and details about that mathematical equation did not stick, I did take away two things from listening to his experiences – first, when choosing to edit something, you must consider the audience and context and make sure that it is right, and second, the technical accuracy of your content is critical as you run the risk of losing your audience’s trust.

A very popular session this year (as in past years) was “The Myths and Trends in the Changing English Language.”They talked through several common issues, such as ending a sentence with a preposition, use of the serial comma, and passive voice.  As a fellow “word nerd,” this session was a light-hearted treat, where I got to learn what “snarky” meant.  My one golden nugget from this session was to be reminded that “goodwill is more important than being right.”  As editors, we sometimes need the goodwill more than the rightness of a rule or guideline.

The Technical Editing SIG had its own session of progression table topics — all about editing!  Many thanks to our moderator, Diane Feldman, who helped coordinate these topics with the help of you, our SIG members!  Each table was full each time, and everyone seemed to really engage in the conversations.  Perhaps each presenter might consider summarizing their session in an article for our blog and newsletter! 

The closing keynote speaker (yes, we got two keynotes this year) was Ze Frank, who told two great stories about the designs of airline safety cards and about “accelerated anxiety” and the changing landscape of how everyone wants to join the media conversation – the explosion of blogs, MySpace, YouTube, etc.  He is a designer at heart, but an excellent communicator through his designs.  I laughed out loud frequently and left the conference with a smile on my face.

Although I attended other technical sessions, which I might try to summarize in other posts or articles, I wanted to highlight these above from my experience at the conference.   Did you attend the conference?  What was your favorite session?  Please consider sharing your experiences with our other SIG members!

Hi everyone.  The SIG is slowly but surely venturing into the brave new world of technologies, and has run into a few snags along the way.  We have this great new blog-driven Web site and Newsletter, and we have started holding quarterly membership meetings, with an audio recording of those meetings.

Unfortunately, we have run into some technical difficulties with our audio recording.  We received a WAV file, which is over 60 MB in size, and are having difficulties posting it to our Web site.  Additionally, it would be really nice to cut out the up-front welcome, introductions, and ramblings and just focus on the really interesting part of the technical program. 

Doubly unfortunately, I have zero experience at working with audio recordings.  I knew to request one, and I have it, but I am stuck with how to best edit, manage, and deliver it to you our members.  So, I am sending up a flare, calling all audio gurus to step forward and help us get past these technical difficulties and provide the audio recording of our April 2007 membership meeting to all of our members.

Any takers?

Hello!

Pat Moell and I are busy putting the finishing touches on the STC Technical Editing SIG events that we will host or participate in at the upcoming STC Technical Communication Summit.  We were excited to see that over 200 SIG members will be attending the summit, and we can’t wait to meet, greet, or eat with you!

We hope that you’ll stop by our Technical Editing SIG table and introduce yourself during the Welcome Reception, Sunday, May 13th, from 7:30 to 9:00pm.  This event is free and open to all summit attendees.  We’ll have some free giveaways for those who stop by.

On Monday, May 14th, at 12:15pm, we’ll be hosting 7 tables at the SIG Networking Luncheon.  You must purchase a networking luncheon ticket, which I believe you can still do at the summit, if you did not pre-purchase your ticket.  Each table we try to have a “host” or a “conversation-starter,” to make sure that everyone meets everyone else at the table and to get us all talking.   Right now, we definitely have 3 tables covered with hosts — do any of you plan on attending the SIG networking lunch on Monday, and would any of you be willing to host a table for us?  If so, please contact me at corbinm@us.ibm.com.

On Tuesday, May 15th, at 7:30am, we’ll be holding our annual SIG meeting (right now, it is in “Mezzanine 100A,” but check the program and registration information).  We will be providing a glorious European continental breakfast, to try to make up for the very early start to your day.  There might not be a free lunch, but there is such a thing as a free breakfast.  :)  We look forward to sharing the news and happenings of the past year with you, but also listening to your thoughts, ideas, concerns, and suggestions for how we can continue to grow and engage more of our SIG members.  Please join us!  We’ll have some more of those free giveaways for those who stop by!

We’re also in the process of preparing a flyer that contains information about the SIG, which also includes a single cheat-sheet of editing-related sessions that you might find interesting or useful to attend.

If you are not attending the conference, we’ll miss meeting you and hope to hear from you on the discussion list, via e-mail (corbinm@us.ibm.com or Pat.Moell@sas.com), or as comments to our blog!  We’ll try to summarize our experiences and post articles to our Web site and discussion list, too.

 If you are attending the conference, please come to one or more of these events and let’s get to know one another!