Odds and ends

Congratulations to Mike Hughes!
Mike was elected an STC Fellow and also elected 2nd Vice President of the Society as a whole! He’s required to attend several formal ceremonies to officially receive these honors, so he bought a tux (very fetching) and wore it as MC of our chapter’s awards banquet. Look for pictures soon on the chapter’s blog.

Banquet wrap up
The Atlanta STC Awards Banquet and the New Media Awards contest have consumed a lot of my time over the last several weeks. The first was a success, but the second . . . well, that’s another blog post. Everyone was in good spirits Tuesday night. The room was about the right size for the crowd. The Maggiano’s staff did a good job helping us with setup and then stuffing us with multiple courses of yummy food.  Several students from Southern Polytechnic State U made the trip over from Marietta, including our scholarship winners. Mike did a good job as MC. You can read his opening monologue on his blog.

I’ve been polling the banquet attendees and the response is positive with a few suggestions on improvements for next year. Only one respondent complained about the food (and neglected to explain why).

Usability in a nutshell
Congratulations to Jakob Nielsen on his 25th anniversary in the usability field!
His alertbox posting this week provides a concise overview of usability: early history, growth, key components, etc.

Jargon isn’t always bad
I’ve been meaning to blog about this subject, but Shaun Kelly over at the Shoap Technical Services blog beat me to it; see In Defense of Jargon. I’ve attended several STC presentations on language that preached the standard never-use-jargon message. This blanket prohibition has always annoyed me.

If your audience understands the jargon, why not use it? As Shaun puts it, “It [jargon] increases the efficiency of communication between members of the community by cramming a whole lot of meaning into a small linguistic space. . . . And isn’t efficiency of communication a best practice that technical communicators should be leveraging?”

Vote for the New Media Awards

This is a duplicate of the post on the Atlanta STC site.

And the nominees are . . .

The Atlanta STC Chapter is hosting its first New Media Awards in an effort to promote new media in our profession. We solicited nominations in three categories: blog posts, videos, and podcasts. The only requirement was that nominations had to be related to technical communication in some way.

Now it’s your turn to vote.

In the Podcast category, we have four nominees:

Prioritizing for the Reader By Harry Miller, 3:17 minutes

Is Technical Writing Boring? By Tom Johnson and Heidi Hansen, 22 minutes

Six Tips for Effective E-mail By George Hayhoe, 5:04 minutes

Technical Communications and India By Scott Nesbitt and Aaron Davis, 18:29 minutes

The Technical Communication Blog Post nominees are:

Can help authors afford to ignore Google?
From HelpScribe by Craig Haiss, March 7, 2008

The technical writer’s resume - a view from the other side of the desk
From Technical Writer, September 30, 2006

Technical Writing in Transition
From User Advocacy, by Chris Borokowski, November 20, 2007

Encyclopedias do not user assistance make
From User Assistance by Mike Hughes, July 16, 2007

In the video category, the nominees are in two categories this year: Comedy and Technical Information and Instrution. You can watch the videos below.

Click this link to cast your vote!!

Comedy nominees

The First Help Desk Call

PC vs. Mac: Music

Technical Writer Song

Technical Information and Instruction nominees

Web 2.0 The Machine is Us/ing Us

RSS in Plain English

Information R/Evolution

Come dine with me! (y otros como yo)

Dudes and dudettes,

If you haven’t made your reservations for the Atlanta Society for Technical Communication annual awards banquet, by golly, get crackin’!

This year we’ve ditched the rubber chicken at the Marriott in favor of (mama mia!) Maggiano’s at Perimeter Mall. 

Don’t tell me you have something better to do on April 22. (It’s a Tuesday, for Pete’s sake!) 

All the important people in tech comm in Atlanta will be there so you will want to come and rub shoulders with us. (No, I’m not going strapless.)

You can check out this year’s award-winning entries and pick up some pointers on how to improve your own work. Then we will joyfully toast the winners as they accept their awards. You’ll also meet and honor the STC activists who’ve worked hard all year to put together the monthly chapter presentations, run the competitions, solicit sponsors, reach out to students, organize community service events, and put together our successful Currents conference. They are all people worth knowing. 

If I don’t know you yet, please come and introduce yourself. I’ll be the one running around like a chicken with her head cut off so just tackle me at the appropriate moment. If I do know you, please come and tell me what you are doing these days. 

Mike Hughes is MC’ing and Mark Wallis is the official paparazzo. 

Allergic to gluten? No excuse! We can accommodate. 

I’m off to buy my frock. See you there!!!!

 

Come to Atlanta in 2009

It may be too early to promote the 2009 STC Summit in Atlanta, but I just had two waves of family visits that got me thinking about all the cool things there are to do in the ATL.

For example, the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. The Freelance Forum organized a tour there last Saturday. Steve is a member, so we jumped on board. It was a rainy day, but we toured the awesome Fuqua Orchid House, the largest of its kind in the world. They are building, building, building cool stuff here all the time, so by next year it will be even better. Don’t miss the poison frogs!

My nephew Alex came on his 3rd visit to Atlanta. He’s now 17, but when he was 8 and 12, the Wonderful World of Coca-Cola (Don’t-Call-It-The-Coke-Museum ha, ha, ha) was the destination of choice. Everyone should do this once if only to be reminded of how Coke covers (smothers?) the globe (and tastes slightly different in each country).

On an earlier visit we took Alex and my niece Etta to Stone Mountain on an earlier visit. This huge granite protrusion sports an enormous homage to Confederate generals that some may find offensive or absurd, but it was the gum rock that riveted the kids’ attention on that visit. Seems that generations of hikers up Stone Mountain deposited their chewed wads on a boulder at the summit (and a phone pole, and a bush and a stump, etc.)

On this visit, a more mature Alex wanted to tour Emory University and Georgia Tech: just two of the many universities and colleges in the Atlanta area. Georgia Tech is close to downtown. In our family it is considered a venerable institution (Steve’s dad is class of ‘38), but many of those who were rejected admission refer to it mockingly as the “North Avenue Trade School.” Emory is home to the Centers for Disease Control, the Michael C. Carlos Museum. If you are heading over in that direction, check out the Fernbank Museum and the Carter Center.  The Fernbank serves martinis on Fridays, but I’m not sure the Carters sanction alcohol sales, so go there in the morning.  Coming next: Where to EAT in the ATL

Jazz up those presentation titles!

Attendance is declining at our chapter meetings and I suspect that the topic titles are partly to blame.

The February presentation was called ”Best Practices for B2B Marketing Writing.” It probably didn’t seem relevant because most of us are not marketing writers. But I came away from Paul McKeon’s presentation with a greater appreciation for the importance of quality content for our readers and the role we can play in creating that content.

McKeon is with The Content Factor, an Atlanta-based company that produces ”original content for anything that can help you sell—print or web advertising, brochures or blogs, white papers, websites or podcasts.” They write white papers for KnowledgeStorm, for example.

McKeon pointed out that unlike typesetters, bank tellers, and travel agents, writers aren’t headed for obsolesence any time soon. In fact, in the world of the World Wide Web, there’s been a decisive shift toward content over form. Strong Language recently published an interview with Whitney Quesenbery on this subject.

A catchier title for the presentation would have been “Why Content Matters” or “Ten Ways to Pump Up Your Writing.”

In March, we faced a similar problem. Scott Abel is a popular speaker with a huge following through The Content Wrangler.(By the way, if you haven’t joined The Content Wrangler Community yet, do it now!)

Scott is a lively and provocative speaker, but his title was a real yawner: “Leveraging Software Tools To Help You Ensure Content Quality.” The main point of Scott’s talk was that we need to be doing more to increase productivity through intelligent use of technology to manage content.

Suggested titles if Scott plans to do this one again:
“Why You Aren’t a Professional”
“Improve Your Productivity and Prove It to Your Management”
“Ten Ways to Work Smarter with Your Content”

 We aren’t the only organization plagued with boring meeting titles.
Check out this exciting program sponsored by the Atlanta chapter of PMI tomorrow:

““Understanding SMEs: Using Humanizing Networks to Manage the Project Impact of Subject Matter Experts’ Heterogynous Needs” It has naptime written all over it, but it probably will be a great talk.

When we engage speakers for our meetings, we should help them think of more compelling names for their presentations. It helps boost attendance and makes it more likely the speaker will be asked to repeat the talk somewhere else.

Writers UA comes to your desktop through blogs

Ahhh, Web 2.0!

I only get to go to one conference a year so I usually choose the STC Summit. But I’ve always wanted to go to WritersUA because of the cutting edge technology discussions that take place there.

Thanks to the (pardon the adjective) robust tech comm blogging community out there, I can now get first-hand, detailed, and timely reports from conferences like this.

Check out Pamplisest and Functioning Form for some good blogs on the sessions there.

Our Atlanta technical communicators were well-represented:
Rob Houser, Scott Deloach, Mike Hughes, and Mark Wallis all presented.

Mark reprised his presentation on DITA projects that he gave at our November STC Chapter meeting.
The blog reviews are favorable. Good work, Mark!

Atlanta STC conference is around the corner

The Atlanta STC Chapter’s annual conference (Currents) is March 14 to 15 at Southern Polytechnic State University.

I will be there. Will you join me?

Friday is a day-long workshop on design principles led by Jean-luc Doumont of Principae. I’ve attended some of his sessions at the STC Summit conferences and was convinced we had to bring him to Atlanta for Currents. Jean-luc actively engages his audience because he delivers his content with creativity, humor, and style. It’s a pleasure to learn from him.

Most of us have little or no training in design, yet we’re usually expected to design as well as write when we create our deliverables. Jean-luc will help you understand what good design is all about. You’ll come away from the workshop with more confidence to create better templates, illustrated documents, and online Help.

Friday night we’re all getting together at the Delkwood Grill around 5 for cocktails and dinner. If you can’t make it to the workshop, stop by and meet Jean-luc, Mark Clifford (STC 1st VP), and the rest of us.

Saturday morning incoming STC President (at the International level) Mark Clifford give a keynote entitled, “You and Your STC.” This is a good opportunity to hear about the many changes taking place in the STC internationally.

Following that will be several rounds of presentations, workshops, demos, and discussions on a wide range of topics. Yours truly will be speaking along with the leading thinkers and movers and shakers and teachers from our region. This is a chance to take a leap forward in your understanding of technical communication principles, trends, research, debates, and new ideas. Presenters will take the time to talk to you after their sessions if you have specific questions or problems you’re working on.

During the breaks you can shop for the latest books at the book table (if I haven’t snatched them up first!).

Jean-luc wraps up the day with a presentation called “Road Signs.”

But don’t leave just yet! The RAFFLE promises to be the best ever this year thanks to the diligent efforts of Gene Larson, our chapter sponsorship manager. You may walk away with your own copy of MadCap Flare or Doc-to-Help or get a free class at echoeleven. Lots of other door prize goodies, too.

 Seats are still available, so sign up now! I think you’ll agree it’s a real bargain.

Irregardless: Still not OK

My favorite e-mail each month is the Q & A from the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS). This places me firmly in the “rear-brainer” category according to Mike Hughes.

At any rate, I was relieved to see that CMOS is holding the line on “irregardless” after a reader cited this from Wikipedia:

The term “irregardless” has begun to move towards acceptance because incorrect words or grammatical conventions are absorbed by the English language based on common usage.

(I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that there is a Wikipedia entry for this word, but I was.)

To its credit, Wikipedia includes this admonition:

It is apparent that the word originated from regional deviations and was subsequently re-introduced to the wider English-speaking community, and thus the use of the term should be avoided if one takes the position that this word should not enter common use.

But the CMOS answer lady is more blunt.

At the moment, . . . there’s no reason to change a perfectly good word like “regardless” to one that is bound to raise the hackles of many readers.

Dear readers, here’s hoping your hackles remain prone for the foreseeable future.

Monday humor: Toddler explains Star Wars

Technical communication?

Atlanta STC blog is now live

Our beautiful new chapter newsletter is online!

Kudos to Robert Armstrong for the design and execution!

This will replace our tired old newsletter, which has been on life support for a couple of years. With the blog format, we can post news and information as it becomes available.

With the STC Summit scheduled for Atlanta in 2009, we now have a year and then some to perfect this communication tool.

Atlanta chapter members (and others!) who want to submit a posting, should contact Robert or Al Hood, our chapter president.