The new STC India admin council took office early last month and they are raring to go. The theme for the year is—2010 is the year of the technical communicator!
There are several activities planned for the year, and as the STC India webmaster, I’m delighted to bring you news and updates as often as possible.
This is part 2 of the “What I Expect from STC” series. The first part is related to the core learning experience and research.
Tom Johnson never disappoints with what he comes up with every time. He’s always trying out new things, spreading the knowledge, and is elegant about it.
In his recent article, he talks about a webinar presented to STC community leaders on chapter and SIG websites. More importantly though, he raises an important issue about our fragmented communities and the Chapter/SIG web site problem.
A friend had dropped in last weekend and we were talking about his interests in moving to a technical writing career. He is happy with his current job as a product support engineer, so I asked him a few questions as to why he wanted to change his career.
This is the time of making and implementing new year resolutions, but I had made my list for 2010 a few years back. I’ll not reveal them out here, but you can see the means to the end on this blog. Hopefully, you’ll find stuff that is both interesting and thought-provoking in a positive way.
The inspiration for this blog comes from a desire and belief that I can offer something potentially valuable to the profession of technical communication.
If you’re not a technical writer, you would find this blog offering insights and trying to shed some light where few have bothered to do so.
You can drop in your ideas for topics on which I can spend my time researching and write about my findings. In a short while from now, I’ll accept guest posts from you as well.
Thanks for dropping by and hoping to start a long conversation with you in the years to come.
Take care and have a great 2010!
Update: This is part 1 of the “What I Expect from STC” series. The second part is about fragmented communities in our profession.
We know that STC is in a financial mess and has increased the membership fees drastically to address the problems.
There have been many arguments about the relevance and benefits of becoming a member of STC. I pick one such discussion from Sarah O’Keefe blog post, A mercenary view of STC. I’ve read tons of such views and comments. I’m fighting the same battle as many others while trying to convince myself to renew my STC membership this year. Here’s my take on it.
STC’s Intercom magazine for September/October 2009 includes a featured article available to all. We often find technical writers or aspirants looking for resources that would equip them to learn and build skills. The following article has a good list of useful books.
Foundation Books: A Lone Writer’s Annotated List
By: David Kowalsky, Senior Member
Kowalsky provides a compilation of suggested foundation books for technical communicators. He includes books on style, management, editing, design and presentation, writing for the web, and DITA and HTML.
I wonder if we could lay our hands on these books. If not, it would be a good idea to recommend them to the libraries at work or closer home.
When you’re working in the Epic Editor, you may not be able to paste clipboard text that contains tags, such as:
This is a sample text that contains tags <passwd>such as this</passwd>.
You’ll see a warning note at the left bottom of the editor, like this:
Insights
In one of the recent updates to the Official Google blog, I came across an interesting application called Google Insights for Search. Here’s what they say about the application:
Looking at search trends helps you understand when, where and how the world’s interests have changed. Simply type in search terms to see how search query volume has evolved over time, in which geographic regions search interest is greatest and other related searches.
Checkout the issue of INDUS at http://stc-india.org/indus/index.htm
More about the issue: Writing Technically: INDUS Apr – May 2009 released
Several product development teams use Q-Gate milestones to track, communicate, and move forward at various stages of development. Each milestone, identified by a number (for example, M260), indicates the progress of all related processes/projects, including technical documentation.
So, what is Q-Gate?
My World (personal blog)