Author: Yoel Strimling

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Minutes from Our Business Meeting at the Conference

Virginia Janzig

The business meeting of the STC Technical Editing Special Interest Group (TE SIG) was called to order by Pat Moell on 3 June 2008, at 7:30 a.m., in the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown Hotel.
Pat recognized members of the board who were present. She also noted that the Distinguished Service Award was going to be presented to Diane Feldman at the 55th Annual STC Technical Communication Summit recognition banquet that evening.

Pat identified SIG accomplishments and areas of direction for the SIG:
• Bylaws, budget, and strategy
• Job listing aids
• Continue to hold annual elections (first election held October 2007)
• Provide 2 scholarships yearly
• Continue quarterly membership meetings
• Improve Web site

Pat asked each attendee to introduce themselves and identify what the TE SIG is doing that is worthwhile and identify things that might be offered to the membership.

SIG suggestions
• Continue quarterly meeting topics
• Consider repeating popular topics
• Discussion list is useful
• Opportunity to meet people
• Sense of community, validation of work and career
• Love of language (St. Bernadette’s Barking Dog)
• Change time of meeting once a year to accommodate other time zones
• Job bank, specific editing opportunities, possible link to LinkedIn?

Style guides and other resources
• Style manual in a wiki
• Consolidating style guides
• Need strong knowledgebase
• List of style manuals
• Open source style guide. Sun is driving this. SIG needs to be heavily involved.
• Automate process for updating style guides.
• Common ground for international style guide: international companies using one language with writers and editors from many languages and cultures.
• Terminology – AP, Chicago Manual of Style, IEEE, software, writing (content management)

Editing – types, different ways to do it, skills
• Types of editing: journalism, technical, peer (peer review), small groups, international groups, group editing, content versus context
• Differentiate writing and editing
• Writer-to-editor ratios – how to handle, what to edit
• Expanding editing skills to provide value, protect job
• Editors who do other things – how to juggle different jobs
• Collaborating with writers, subject matter experts, building relationships, lessons learned
• Editing engineers and other highly technical subject matter experts – approaches

Management stuff
• Getting STC into large companies (possible?)
• Getting STC out to more lone writers
• Metrics for management, ROI, prove the value of editing to management.

The meeting was adjourned at 8:35am.

 

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Impressions of STC’s 55th Annual Conference

Pat Moell

I enjoyed meeting so many Technical Editing SIG members at the STC Conference in Philadelphia in early June. Thanks to all of you who volunteered to work at our table at the Welcome Reception, to facilitate the editing discussions at the SIG luncheon, and to present at our Technical Editing SIG Progression, “Editing Influences across Technical Communication.”

I was thrilled to see such great attendance at our annual breakfast meeting on Tuesday, June 3. Thank you for arising early enough to attend a 7:30 a.m. meeting. You all had great ideas for activities our SIG could be doing. We’ll be working on a strategic plan that will incorporate some of these ideas to work on over the next two years.

Leadership Day was informative and inspiring. Some characteristics of an exemplary leader are to model the way (do what you say you will do), inspire a shared vision, challenge the process, enable others to act and strengthen them, and encourage and respect others.

The quality of all the presentations I attended this year was very high. There were many good sessions for technical editors to learn more about their craft.

One general trend that I noticed was expressed succinctly by Andrea Ames: “Think more! Write less!” This trend toward minimalism was well represented by the session, “Editing Modular Documentation: Some Best Practices,” by Michelle Corbin and Yoel Strimling. If you follow their rules for chunking, labeling, and linking and follow their best practices, you will find that you have clear, simple topics that users can easily understand.

Another trend was expressed well by our keynote speaker, Howard Rheingold, the author of Smart Mobs; he spoke of the power of social networking through the use of our modern technologies to change history, our businesses, our government, and our lives.

If you are interested, the session materials are available as a link from the http://www.stc.org(external link) site.

I hope to see you next year in Atlanta.

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Who Are We? What Should STC Be?

Mike Hughes

I am Mike Hughes, and I am running for Second VP for the Society for Technical Communication. In this article I tell you a little about me and my vision for our profession.

Who am I?

I am a Society Fellow currently on the editorial advisory board for Technical Communication and the Ken Rainey Excellence in Research award committee. I chaired the subcommittee on Research at the STC Academic-Industry Leaders Summit in 2007, and I was organizer and leader for the Sharing Corporate Knowledge Institute at the Summit Conference in 2007. I am also currently filling an interim director position on the board. In my day job, I am a user assistance architect for IBM. I have a master’s degree in Technical Communication and a PhD in Instructional Technology, and I am a Certified Performance Technologist through the International Society for Performance Improvement.

Who are we?

Technical communication is a diversified profession, one that supports multiple career paths and roles. Whether we call ourselves technical writers, information developers, instructional designers, content managers, or whatever, we improve the user technology experience by providing information that eases and enhances that experience.

When our profession was initially emerging, we stated our value in terms of the correctness and completeness of our documents and the clarity of the language in those documents. Then, as we matured, we started defining our value in terms of how we benefited our end users. And now we are taking our value proposition to yet a higher level: how we support the missions and objectives of the organizations that employ us. This means that our value can’t stop at the quality of the communications we produce; it must extend to the effectiveness of the actions they enable, and beyond that, to how the improved effectiveness of our users benefits our sponsors. The list is long, but these are just a few:

  • Increased customer adoption (because new products and services are easier to install and use)
  • Reduced support costs (because product owners can maintain their own products better)
  • Lower medical costs (due to better patient compliance with medicines and procedures)
  • Improved product quality and reduced production costs (because workers can comply with best practices that are easily understood)
  • Increased customer loyalty (because the web sites and other communication channels we create build communities of common value and interests)

 

What should STC be?

If those are some of the things we are about, what should the role of STC be?

  • Provide professional development programs in the core body of knowledge that defines us as a profession
  • Show leadership and provide education in the emerging tools and technologies that direct our future as a profession
  • Serve as our advocate within government and industry to articulate our contributions and needs as a profession

We have invested a lot of our society energy and resources over the last several years in improving the structure and governance of STC. I think we can quit reinventing ourselves now and put our new structure to work. We need to shift our focus outward again and ensure that as members we are getting full value for our dues. My main focus as an officer will be the following:

  • Maintain a balanced budget that funds the programs that add the most value for members
  • Ensure that our publications and conferences provide the content that helps members do their jobs
  • Create a collaboration where members, vendors, employers, and academic communities help technical communicators keep up with the ever-changing demands for tools and technology knowledge
  • Support a certification program through STC that helps our sponsors trust and understand our value and that creates sustainable careers for technical communicators.

Please visit my website at http://www.mindspring.com/~mikehughes/index.htm(external link) to get more information on my background or read some of my published papers. Go to my blog at http://user-assistance.blogspot.com(external link) and click the STC label to read more about my positions and thoughts on specific topics related to my candidacy.

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The Impact of XML on Technical Editing

Justin Baker

I remember hearing a lot of chatter at the beginning of this decade about something called XML. I remember hearing about the unknown implications for editors: Would the paradigm of structured documentation and single-sourcing models make editors all but obsolete? I saw myself in a museum behind thick glass. Because of this thing called XML, were we all doomed to go the way of the Gutenberg press?

Well, hardly.

I’ve learned a little about XML over the last seven years, and I feel a little more at ease. To understand XML’s impact on technical editing, let’s first look at a brief overview of the major editing phases of linear-based documentation. We will then examine the nature of XML before finally moving on to how XML affects technical editing.

Linear-based documentation (traditionally called paper-based documentation), has three major editing phases in my own mental editing model: (1) Knowledge Editing, (2) Language Editing, and (3) Layout Editing.

  • Knowledge Editing refers to the technical subject matter in a document both in verbal form (words) as well as in visual form (images). I divide Knowledge Editing into four sublevels: Knowledge Accuracy, Knowledge Completeness, Knowledge Logic, and Knowledge Hierarchy. The first two editing sublevels ensure that the subject matter is accurate and complete. The third editing sublevel ensures that the basic logic of the subject matter is sound, and the fourth editing sublevel ensures that the 1.0, 1.1, 1.1.1 hierarchy of the subject matter is sensible.
  • Language Editing refers to the technical subject matter in a document both in verbal form and visual form. Language Editing focuses on the exposition of the knowledge through words and images. Language Editing encompasses sentence structure, grammar, diction, punctuation, spelling, and character mechanics (font and display attributes). Language Editing focuses on the particular standard visual elements to be used in any given type of illustration. For example, for network diagrams, some companies might want to consistently use the same network-server icon. Language Editing ensures that both the verbal language and the visual language are standardized.
  • Layout Editing focuses on the following document areas:
    • Industry-standard, large-scale document page layout patterns (for example, a traditional template for a specific industry project plan)
    • Text and illustration spacing
    • Large-scale font formatting (small-scale, or individual, font formatting is part of character mechanics under Language Editing)
    • Miscellaneous layout mechanisms such as running headers, page numbers, and hyperlinks

Now that I have laid the editing foundation for this examination, let’s examine the nature of XML before we see how it affects the editing model.

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a metadata language that allows you to tag a chunk of text with labels that explain the nature of that chunk of text. XML promotes the use of tags that indicate “this is a name” or “this is an inventory part.” XML also controls the structure of a document to a large degree. Using the same set of labels, or XML tags, you can dictate the pattern of particular chunks of text. Perhaps you simply have a set of XML tags that are “heading” and “paragraph.” You can dictate rules for the structure of the document such as a paragraph must always appear right after a heading or a figure can never appear without a caption. The library of XML tags and the organizational rules for their use within a specific document is referred to as a document type definition (DTD) or an XML schema. So, we have tags that describe the nature of chunks of text within a document, and we have restrictions about how the document can be structured.

For the purposes of this article, there is at least one more way that XML can control a document: layout. A complimentary standard of XML called the XML Stylesheet Language (XSL) can dictate how particular XML tags are displayed. While XML focuses on describing the nature of text, XSL dictates whether a chunk of text appears bolded, or centered, or whatever. With XML and XSL, the nature of text and the formatting of text are kept completely separate.

So how does XML affect technical editing? Well, XML doesn’t control every aspect of technical editing to the point that you and I are relegated to the role of spellchecker, but XML does take a significant amount of control away from the technical editor.

How Does XML Affect Knowledge Editing? XML cannot control the accuracy or completeness of text. Unless XML is instilled with artificial intelligence in the future, it never can, and it never will. However, XML does control knowledge logic and hierarchy to a degree. For example, an XML DTD can control whether chunks of text tagged with a paragraph tag can occur after chunks of text tagged with a heading tag. However, XML cannot control the logic and hierarchy within the tagged chunks of text.

The XML DTD may be able to control the structural logic of the text to some rudimentary degree (for example, the pattern of tagged text must be heading-paragraph-heading-paragraph-subparagraph), but it cannot control the substantive logic within a paragraphs or within a sentence. You could have what is called a well-formed XML document, in which the pattern of heading text chunks and paragraph text chunks satisfies the rules of the XML DTD, but those text chunks could contain complete gibberish, and the XML DTD would not know the difference.

How Does XML Affect Language Editing? XML has the least control in this area. You can tag a chunk of text with a paragraph tag, but that tagging cannot control the sentence structure, grammar, diction, punctuation, or spelling. You can still write a horribly structured sentence, and the XML DTD would never know the difference. Bad spelling could also be rampant in an XML document. As part of the style rules in the related XSL, the character mechanics can be controlled: headings can be made to be a particular font size, case, etc.

How Does XML Affect Layout Editing? This is where XML dominates technical editing across the board. Everything within the layout editing can be controlled by the DTD and the DTD-related XSL: industry-standard, large-scale document page layout patterns; specific text and illustration spacing; large-scale font formatting; and miscellaneous layout mechanisms such as running headers, page numbers, and hyperlinks. With a document developed using XML, the technical editor doesn’t need to focus on these layout aspects. XML allows the technical editor to focus on knowledge and language.

As you can see, XML does not relegate technical editors to the trash bin of technical documentation history. Even with the restrictions of XML, technical writers have a lot of room to maneuver, and therefore a lot of room to make mistakes. Where there are mistakes, there are technical editors. Technical editors are still needed to edit for accuracy and completeness, and to a large degree, a human brain is still needed to ensure correct logic and hierarchy. All the traditional language skills are still needed. Layout is governed largely by XML, but, for those of you who always loathed setting margins and making text bold at a 14-point font size, your day of deliverance has come. Until an XML language is developed with an artificial intelligence that can recognize the illogical structure within any given sentence or that two sentences have been turned around, a technical editor will be needed.

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STC as the Global Leader for Technical Communicators: Rich Maggiani’s Vision

Rich Maggiani

STC needs Board members who are experienced in the field, who understand our profession and the contribution we make to the world, who recognize the role that STC plays in representing and promoting our profession, who understand the services STC must provide for our membership, and how STC must be the global leader for us. This is my vision for STC and one that I will arduously pursue as your Director-at-Large.

I care deeply about STC. I have been an STC member for more than 12 years. I have held a volunteer position in every one of those years, beginning with being a co-founder of the Vermont chapter to my current role of leader of the Public Relations committee (which has 18 international members). Last month, I was honored to become an STC Fellow in recognition of my work as a marketing and technical communicator.

My profession is technical communication. I have been practicing that profession for well over 20 years. In my work, I constantly focus on promoting technical communication as a profession, and technical communicators as professionals who create unending value.

Experienced with STC Board matters. I have been doing STC Board-related work for over three years now. Three consecutive Board Presidents have appointed me: one year as Assistant to the President for Competitions; two years as Public Relations leader (my current position) where my committee has been breaking new ground in researching and promoting technical communication and technical communicators around the world.

Experienced as a Board Director. I am experienced with Boards of Directors. I have been Board President for the Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility (VBSR) after sitting on that Board for four years. VBSR is a state-wide business organization. As Board President, I directed a transition from a tactical to a strategic Board. I have also been Board President for two years for a food cooperative in New York after having sat on that Board the two previous years.

Business experience. For over sixteen years, I owned and operated a full-service marketing and technical communication agency. Currently, I am running Solari Communication, a company dedicated to applying technical communication to help clients increase sales and profitability. As a business owner, I understand how STC as an organization must operate to be successful, I understand the inner workings of technical communication and how to successfully market and promote our profession.

Educational experience. I currently teach technical communication to undergraduate students at Champlain College in Vermont. Previously, I taught graduate students at Saint Michael’s College business writing and communication skills. I am certified to teach secondary education through adult learners. I have also presented numerous sessions on communication topics to STC local, regional, and international conferences as well as other organizational conferences.