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.