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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.