by Kelly Schrank

[Note: I wrote a very detailed 14-page conference report for my employer. I then abstracted that report and published a 5-page article in Newsbrief, the Mid-South Chapter’s newsletter. What appears here is a belated collection of highlights from that newsletter article.]

The Technical Communication Summit, STC’s 54th Annual Conference, was held May 12–16, 2007, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Around 1,400 people attended the annual STC conference this year.

[…]

My first session was “Estimating and Tracking Project Costs for Financial Success” with Joyce E. Lasecke. I thought this was a good session, very structured with good handouts that make it easy to go back through later and re-learn the concepts. Her presentation had two distinct parts: how to estimate and how to track. She very methodically began the part on how to estimate by outlining the three ingredients to a project estimate: (1) metrics, (2) assumptions, and (3) risk assessments. She then defined those and showed how to use them to your advantage. She went over the case study provided, which seemed to me to be a good example of a project estimate. The part on tracking was also good, with insights for how to start and what to do when you get off track. A good session, especially if project management is part of your job.

My second session was “Effective Page Layout for the Non-Artist” with Jean-Luc Doumont. Jean-Luc was an excellent presenter, very organized and very entertaining. He believes that page layout is about revealing the structure of the document visually. Unlike some people who think that a pretty layout and fancy graphics will bring the reader’s attention to the text, he believes that people will pay attention to the graphics and ignore the text. He also characterized a page as having two dimensions: vertical and horizontal. He believes documents need much more white space than most people allow. He likes big top margins and big left margins. “Space is a luxury.” This is where it became obvious to me that his ideas on design could be a bit “creative” for most technical communicators. His examples are full of white space and seem (to me) to be much more the work of marketing than documentation though I liked the look of them. All in all, an informative and fun session with lots of takeaway ideas.

[…]

My fourth session was “If I’d Known Then What I Know Now – Lessons Learned and Best Practices.” This was a lively and informative panel of speakers. Each discussed a lesson learned in their career and a trend in the technical communication industry. One of the funniest things to come out of this panel (from Bobo Vatovec): “The most common language in the world is Bad English”. A lot of their lessons learned and trend advice was tough to swallow: technical editors being told to lower their level of quality, tech writers being told to spread their wings and move away from our tech pubs departments? But these are experienced technical communicators doing a variety of different things in the industry for big companies and their own companies, so we should at least listen to what they have to say…

My fifth session was “Copymarking, Clarity, and More: Progressions of STC’s Technical Editing Community.” I went to three different tables to learn about three different topics:

1. The first was “Growing and Managing a Formal Editing Process” with Lisa Adair. Lisa is a technical editor for Rockwell Automation, a company that is revamping their whole tech pubs process. Their new system is topic-oriented, not publication-oriented; writers own a section of information, as opposed to documents. Their formal editing process began with a task force that worked on updating the company style guide. They began by picking a secondary style guide, and put topics in the company style guide where the editors veered from the secondary style guide or where the secondary style guide didn’t address something specific to their company. Another instrumental part of their formal editing process was to establish the levels of edit and create an editor’s checklist. The metrics they created in the level of edits document allow them to quantify their job. This was an interesting session for those in big companies that may have many editors, but it emphasized to me the need for an editor’s checklist and to be estimating my work.

2. The second was “Make Every Technical Editing Minute Count” with Jackie Eldridge. Jackie is a very experienced editor who put together a thorough and helpful handout for this progression. To understand the project, she suggested you first find out the purpose of the document from the author. Make sure the introduction material covers this, and that steps are in a logical sequence to that end. To understand the author’s expectation of you, she suggested that you use your editing checklist as a menu: talk to the author about which of these are most important to them. Advantages to knowing the author include being able to look for their trouble spots and fixing those so they do not embarrass them. Generic editing advice included: looking for the three “in”s: inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and incompleteness; making sure there is a source for information presented; and using different colors for different types of edits. I found this session helpful in not only proving what I already know to be correct, but also in offering some different ways of thinking about the process.

3. The third was “Concision and Clarity” with Susan Ledford. Susan is a technical writer and editor with experience in localization issues. She offered four reasons to pursue word reduction: (1) decreases costs, (2) increases readability, (3) increases usability, and (4) supports re-usability and single sourcing. In localization, word reduction is a directly measurable reduction in costs, as those excess words don’t have to be translated. For publications that are printed, shorter documents cost less to print. In addition, there is less to maintain when you reduce documentation length. In single-sourcing situations, the difference is exponential. From a usability standpoint, if there is less to read, readers are more likely to read it. She advises to do the following: (1) Use the search function to help you delete worthless words, (2) Create checklists of the type of words to commonly reduce, and (3) Rephrase sentences and paragraphs and reduce them to “content chunks.”

[…]

My eighth session was “Out of the Solitudes: Progressions of STC’s Lone Writer Community.” I went to three different tables to learn and talk about three different topics:

1.The first was “Preserving Sanity as a Lone Writer” with Dana F. Utz. The sole writer in his department for the last 8 years, Dana believes you should impose structure on your work through a “styles and standards guide.” He also suggests acting as if you are a part of a department in how you approach your work by documenting your tasks in a policies and procedures guide and tracking project time and milestones. He had a very nice handout of the presentation.

2.The second was “Editing Your Own Work” with Jerry D. Franklin. As a freelance high-tech marketing copywriter, Jerry must edit his own work on a regular basis. He offers six suggestions for editing your own work: (1) Take time away from the project to gain your objectivity (distance), (2) Put on your proofreader persona, (3) Use other style guides, (4) Create a style guide and document templates in advance, (5) Get non-SME reviewers on your team (customer service, tech support, marketing), (6) See if you can get a student to proof for the experience.

3.The third was “No Longer Alone” with Christopher Thiessen. Chris was an engaging speaker, very much interested in our own experiences and having us share them. He offered advice for people with specific questions and concerns. Like many of the other editing speakers, he suggested creating a style guide to ease the transition from working alone to working with others, and he suggested creating a list of commonly used words and their preferred usage.

[…]

The conference materials are available on the website. They are organized by presenter, so if you want the materials for any of the sessions I described, you should have an easy time finding them.

Last month, on Salon.com, Gary Kamiya wrote a very interesting article titled “Let us now praise editors,” which you can read here:  http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/07/24/editing/.  Janice Gelb sent this article to our discussion list, quoting a few passages from it, and I was surprised that we did not start any discussions around it. 

As I finished the article, I was left with a series of questions that I thought we might enjoy discussing.  Please feel free to write a comment here to our blog, but please also subscribe to our discussion list, and see what gets going over there.

Here are the questions that this article raised for me:

• Are editors less confident than writers?  Kamiya said that “a good editor needs to be as self-confident as a writer” (mainly because we are dealing in a subjective realm of trying to improve the writing for the reader). 
• Is writing harder than editing?  Kamiya said that writing is very creative, whereas editing is reactive.  Initially, I agreed with that statement, but upon reflection I’m not so sure.
• Are editors an endangered species, especially with online and Internet publishing?  I’d like to think that those writers, those businesses, those publishers who value high quality writing for their readers will not allow us to go the way of the dodo bird.  Kamiya stated: “The art of editing is running against the cultural tide.  We are in an age of volume; editing is about refinement.  It’s about getting deeper into a piece, its ideas, its structure, its language.”  This was one of the few places in the article that Kamiya acknowledged that editing is more than just grammar and style, but it was appropriately located.

Kamiya ends his article by truly singing the praises of editors and suggests, “Someone is noticing. Someone is reading. Someone cares.”  I sure hope he is right.  What do you think?  Is someone noticing?

by Andrea Wenger

Reprinted from Carolina Communique, the newsletter of the Carolina Chapter of STC, by permission of the author and editor.

I was blessed to grow up near Philadelphia during the period when the United States celebrated its Bicentennial. As a child, I visited the Liberty Bell and traipsed along the same cobblestone streets that Benjamin Franklin had walked. I stood in the room where the Declaration of Independence was signed and saw the chair where George Washington sat while presiding over the Continental Congress. And I felt the pride and humility of living in a land where freedom had been hard won.

As writers living in the United States, we have the right to express ourselves without the government clipping our words. (Only our editors have that power.) And we write in English — the most varied and versatile language in the world. With its precision and its expansiveness, English is well-suited to be the language of liberty.

Thomas Paine, whose words roused a nation to war, is perhaps best remembered for writing, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” But as E.B. White points out in The Elements of Style, the same sentiment phrased differently would have been far less memorable. White offers the following examples:

Times like these try men’s souls

These are trying times for men’s souls

Soulwise, these are trying times

Okay, so that last one borders on the ridiculous…but the meaning of all three sentences is identical to the original, even though the effect is not. Thomas Paine understood, as every writer should, the ability of cadence and rhythm and movement to create a powerful sentence. When people read to themselves, they don’t just see the words on the paper — they hear them in their mind’s ear. So the words you chose, and the order you put them in, affect reader experience.

Some linguists and their followers espouse the superiority of earthy Anglo-Saxon words over their genteel Latin counterparts. Consider the word ”put”, with its Germanic roots, and the word ”place”, with its Latin roots. In general, these words mean the same thing, but ”place” is softer. If I were writing installation instructions, I’d tell the user to ”put” the unused screws in the trash, not to ”place” the unused screws in the trash. ”Put” is more direct, while ”place” sounds fussy. But if I were writing a cookbook, I’d tell the reader to ”place” the casserole in the oven, not to ”put” the casserole in the oven. ”Place” is more polite, while ”put” can sound harsh.

So the key is knowing when to use the lilting Latin words and when to use the muscular Anglo-Saxon ones. There’s room for both — that’s why both have survived through the thousand years since William the Conqueror took the throne of England and changed its language forever.

Writers of English have choices. Most every word we commit to paper (or its electronic equivalent) has a synonym. We can push buttons, or we can press buttons — and here in North Carolina, we can even mash buttons. Push is stronger than press, and stronger words are often better. But I don’t want my readers to break the buttons. So I use press.

Parts of Speech
All Men are created equal, but all parts of speech are not. Verbs are the strongest, followed by nouns, adjectives, and adverbs, in that order. And all verbs are not created equal, either; conjugations of the verb to be are particularly passive, and often a sign that the action lies elsewhere in the sentence.

I recently encountered a translation into English that read: The service brings simplified access to information, a reduction in costs, and an increase in productivity. Though structurally sound, it’s dead on the page. Strings of such sentences can hypnotize readers until they read only words without processing the meaning. So I changed the sentence to: The service simplifies access to information, reduces costs, and increases productivity. Not exactly Pulitzer-worthy, but at least it moves.

Sound
Words can sing or jolt, they can zip or grind. Sentences can frolic gently in the fields, or they can scratch like a cat trapped up a tree. Writers compose music through their combinations of syllables — whether sweet or jarring, invigorating or soporific.

Does any of this affect reader comprehension? At the very least, if you keep your readers awake, they’re more likely to understand what you’ve written. The more technical the material, the more crucial every aspect of writing is — from clarity to lyricism. Mix your sentence length. Use the simplest word, yet the most apt. Keep your verbs active and your nouns concrete. Eliminate unnecessary modifiers. Punctuate flawlessly.

Writing that uses syntax and sound to propel the reader through the text requires an awareness of language, but not an extraordinary investment of time. With practice, it becomes second nature.

That said, I’m not suggesting you throw out consistency in favor of an exciting turn of phrase, or that you bog down the user with prose that aspires to poetry. The rules of technical writing still apply. But don’t be afraid to surprise the reader with a word that expresses your humanity. Even technical writing shouldn’t sound mechanical — at least not all the time. As William Zinsser says in On Writing Well, “Words are the only tools you will be given.” Make the most of them.

STC’s 55th International Conference will be held June 1-4, 2008 in Philadelphia, PA.

Technical editors need and want to see more conference sessions about the interests and concerns of  editors. YOU can help address this need by proposing a topic to present in a Technical Editing progression.**

The progression format is ideal for presenting tips and tricks or for discussing a single aspect of technical editing that would not warrant a full-length presentation. It is also a great way to “get your feet wet” if you have never presented at an STC conference. The roundtable format is conducive to sharing ideas instead of delivering a lecture.

If you think you would like to present a topic in a Technical Editing progression, please send me the following information by AUGUST 22:

• Your name and contact information
• A description of the topic you would like to discuss
• The key points you will cover
• Sample handouts or discussion questions.

Stumped for ideas? Here’s a list of possible ideas to stimulate your thinking:

• Practical editing tips and tricks — not tool related, but editing related
• Process of online editing
• Editors’ role in content management
• Editing graphics, figures, and other visual elements
• Editing remotely, building editing relationships across the miles
• Editing non-native English writers
• Comparing and contrasting editing styles for native vs. non-native writers
• Creating and using a frequently used terms list
• Project management for editors — how to juggle multiple projects all the time

Please note: It is not necessary to have your presentation completely mapped out at this time. Spend some time thinking about your key points and what sorts of questions you might ask to keep the discussion going. If handouts will help convey your points or add value to your message, describe what they might contain.

Taking part in a progression is a lot of fun. We urge you to give it a try!!! Don’t hesitate to contact  us if you have questions about what’s needed or if you’d like help with framing your idea.

Send your proposal information by AUGUST 22 to:

corbinm@us.ibm.com

Michelle Corbin and Pat Moell
Co-Managers, STC Technical Editing SIG

**In a progression, 8-12 speakers each deliver an oral presentation (5-10 minutes) to a group of 6-10 participants at a roundtable. The speaker moderates a short discussion with the roundtable participants for 15-20 minutes. Then the participants change tables to hear a different presentation. Each presentation is made 3 times, each time with a different group of roundtable participants.

Hi everyone!

During the last week in July, we held our quarterly membership meeting.  As promised, we recorded the technical program and have made it available off our our Meeting Archives page.  It’s nearly 11 MB, but you should be able to download it to your system and listen to it on your favorite music-playing device.  I don’t know that anyone would consider editing as music for the ears, but….. Enjoy!

Hi everyone!  Lindsay Snyder contacted Pat and I about helping her with a graduate school class.  Here is her announcement about her survey.  If you have 15-20 minutes and can help her out, please do so!  Please respond by August 20th, 2007.

My name is Lindsay Snyder and I am a graduate student in the Publication Management program at Drexel University.   I am currently completing an independent study on how professionals work as freelance technical writers and editors rather than full time employees of a single company.  Among the topics that I am researching are how freelancers obtain contracts, the pros and cons of freelancing, and determining whether freelancing for technical writing and editing is a viable option for the everyday professional—is it financially possible at every step of career, or just for mid to high level professionals?
 
I would greatly appreciate your participation in the following questionnaire so I may gather data about these topics.   The survey is available through my website, www.pages.drexel.edu/~les37/.   Thank you in advance for your contribution to this study.

If you have comments or questions about this survey, please contact Lindsay directly at:  lindsay.snyder@gmail.com

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.  ).