STC Body of Knowledge: A Promising Effort

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 | Technical Communication

When I first read about the Society for Technical Communication’s effort to assemble a body of knowledge, I admit that I thought it wasn’t worth my time. That it wouldn’t affect me or wouldn’t have any big impact.

Frankly, I was mistaken.

The task force appointed to spearhead this effort gave a couple of presentations on the STC Body of Knowledge (or BOK, pronounced “bock”—not the most graceful reading of an acronym). I didn’t attend the first one, but I attended the second, where the task force members showed us what has been built so far at the BOK wiki. We developed a list of questions that we wanted the BOK to answer. This really opened my eyes to the potential the BOK has.

I’m not sure where my first impression of this effort came from. I think I considered it something that STC was doing to puff up the importance of the organization and our profession artificially. My thoughts were probably along the lines of “Hey, we’re just technical communicators. We don’t need something like a body of knowledge.”

However, this concept is important to the profession’s being recognized as a profession, one that’s made up of specialists. The example that the task force used in the Summit session was that engineers have a certain body of information they have to master in order to be recognized as professionals and specialists in their field. We ought to have the same thing. And I agreed with them.

Technical communication is changing rapidly, as some of the Summit presentations specifically discussed. The idea of having a central place for us to gather virtually and find out the best practices is significant. Who better to manage this repository than members of the organizational face of tech comm? STC membership includes many of the best minds in the profession, and the BOK offers an opportunity for all of them to collaborate.

The BOK, however, has the potential to be much more than a means for technical communicators to stay up to date. As you can see by the questions we came up with, the BOK can serve many other kinds of people—from students looking to enter the field to business executives trying to understand what technical communication is about.

More important perhaps, it’s a step toward general recognition that not just anyone can write well, and not just anyone can do tech comm well. Specific skills and expertise are needed. As shown in one of the sessions I attended at the Summit, we would rather hire someone who knows how to write and needs to learn the subject matter than someone who knows the subject matter but needs to learn how to write.

My colleague drew my attention to the EServer TC Library, which is a huge repository of documents of interest to technical communicators. I took some time to browse a couple of categories, and it looks like I found my entire summer’s reading for the next five years on this site. There could very well end up being some overlap between the BOK and the EServer Library, but I think one of the BOK’s main differences is that there will be audiences of the information other than technical communicators.

If you’re a member of STC and would like to help with the BOK, contact Caroline Jarrett (caroline dot jarrett at effortmark dot co dot uk) for an account, and start contributing. The task force needs volunteers for standards, editing, content creation, and other areas. I think it’s a great opportunity to have a positive impact on the profession as a whole.

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