Elections for officers and board of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) are open. Today on Twitter, Peggy Harvey (@paharvey) said she wishes students could vote. I retweeted and replied, “Taxation without representation? If a student cares enough to vote, shouldn’t he/she be able to?” This allusion to the American Revolution was branded later as absurd. I admit that I was using some hyperbole here by making that comparison. I was not in any way suggesting that I think STC is run by tyrants who don’t care about the common man and are interested only in getting money out of us. (No offense to any readers from the United Kingdom.)

What I was highlighting was that student members of STC are paying members and therefore have invested in STC. They are interested in the future of STC, which is directly affected by which officers and board members are elected. I think that if a student member cares enough to vote, he or she should have the ability to do so.

Benefit Number One

I admit that when I was a student member five years ago, I didn’t care enough about happenings at the Society level to vote even if I had had the ability to. But just as in national politics, at least in the United States, many people who have the ability to vote in STC elections don’t take the opportunity to. If STC wants as much participation in the international elections as possible, permitting student members to vote is a way to accomplish that.

Benefit Number Two

Giving student members the ability to vote has another benefit: These members will likely feel more loyalty for STC because they haven’t just paid money into the Society; they’ve also helped select its leadership. STC giving student members a vote shows that they care what the students think. They will be more likely to renew next year, possibly as full members. I think STC could be making a big mistake by continuing to not allow student members to vote. As a chapter president, I’d like for student members within my chapter to vote in chapter elections.

Ignorance Alert

Now, I say all of this without knowing why STC leaders have made the decision to exclude student members from elections. Part of the rationale may be that 1) if students get a significant discount, their benefits should be limited somehow, and 2) by limiting the benefits student members receive, we prevent use of this membership level by people who aren’t actually students. (I don’t mean to doubt the ethics of any STC members or would-be members, but you never know what some people will do to save a few bucks.) STC could verify the enrollment of student members at the educational establishments they name when joining, but that’s extra overhead that we don’t need, particularly right now when STC is trying to reduce overhead.

If you have any insight as to why student members can’t vote or would like to otherwise voice your opinion on the matter, please comment.

And if you’re a member of the STC Ideas Ning network, you can see Bill Swallow’s proposal regarding student member voting.

Yesterday, I gave an STC Web seminar on using quick reference guides as part of a documentation set. (I’ve included a picture of how I used my wife’s earwarmer to work around the fact that the speakerphone feature on my new phones is less than desirable.) I answered a number of questions that participants typed into the meeting’s chat box and would like to pass them on. However, I ran into some technical difficulty when I tried to save the chat transcript, so I’m going from memory when writing these questions. These aren’t in any particular order other than the order in which I remembered them. I’ll also do my best to answer, especially now that I’m not on the spot.

What’s your favorite typeface for quick reference guides?

Given the audiences I write for, I anticipate that most of my guides are going to be printed, so I use a serif typeface for body text. I’ve gotten somewhat weary of Times New Roman—so little personality to go along with its readability—so I’ve gone to Cambria. (I know that Word 2007 has heading styles pre-programmed using Cambria, but I usually use sans serif typefaces for headings.) I think Cambria makes a good body typeface.

For headings, I may use Arial, Lucida Sans Unicode, or something similar. I don’t really care for Verdana because it’s so wide. And when you bold Verdana text, it blows up like a balloon.

How do you estimate how long it takes to create a quick reference guide?

That’s a tough question because it varies. How long a guide will take depends on how much of the content is text or images, how much of the content you can use from an existing help system, and so on. If you’re just starting to create quick reference guides, they may take you longer, but as you do more, you’ll probably get faster at them. But each one can take its own tender loving care, so it’s hard to say for sure.

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Kevin Cuddihy has posted my guest post on STC’s Notebook in advance of Wednesday’s Web seminar on quick reference guides.

As of this morning, 58 people are signed up, which is exciting and a bit intimidating at the same time.

If you’re interested, you can get more information and sign up on STC’s seminars page.

I recently held some informal usability testing for some changes to an online help system I was considering. Because I hadn’t done any testing on the original help, I incorporated some of that as well. Doing so pretty much confirmed that I was on the right track with the changes I wanted to make. The help as it stood wasn’t very usable.

All documentation can stand some usability testing. We technical communicators like to claim that we’re user focused and user advocates. I like to believe that myself. However, sometimes we can be more like developers than we want to admit. We do things our way, the way we think is best. We may have even proved in the past that what we’re doing is pretty user-friendly. But times—and users—change.

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I’m presenting a webinar for STC on Wednesday, February 10. The event will be a reprisal of the presentation on quick reference guides that Tom Johnson and I gave at the 2009 STC Summit, though with some updates to the content.

Description: Quick reference guides provide a friendly way for users to learn new products without burying themselves in a manual or online help system. This seminar will help participants understand the benefits of using quick reference guides as a primary method of documentation. At the end of the session you will leave with tips and suggestions for developing organization, content, and layout for quick reference material.

To register, go to STC’s Web seminars page. The cost is $79 for STC members and $149 for others.

Over the weekend, I posted my thoughts on the STC dues increase that was announced in October.

On a related note, Tom Johnson posted the results to date of a brief survey we’ve done with the chapter. If our chapter is a microcosm as Tom wonders in this post, then more challenges await STC in 2010.

Recently Michael Hughes, First Vice President of STC (meaning Guy in Line for President Next Year) wrote a post about what it’s like leading STC during this difficult time.

Michael says:

We tend to keep a core of loyal members (I love all of you), but that has created a demographic problem: A lot of us are older and will be retiring in the coming decade. We are losing our “next generation” of STC members. The upshot is that decisions about how to grow the society are being made by those who often lack the perspective of what the target population wants. Ouch!! OK, that one hits this sixty-year old boy too, so hold off on the flames.

You Talkin’ to Me?

I consider myself among the “next generation” that Michael talks about. Depending on whom you ask, I was born during the somewhat fuzzy transition from Generation X to Generation Y. I graduated from college about four years ago and have a grand total of five years’ experience or so in technical communication. If I’ve ever come across here as anything different (the most likely being even more ignorant than I really am), then you have my apologies for deceiving you.

I agree that the best people to know how to reach the (shall we say) newer generations of technical communicators are themselves. But is replacing the current leadership with a bunch of twenty-thirty-something, forward-thinking, tech-savvy hotshots the answer?

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