Gryphon Mountain is the online home of Ben Minson—technical communicator, writer, and cartoonist. This blog discusses tech comm and other writing topics. More »
Tom Johnson of I’d Rather Be Writing interviewed me about Don Moyer’s STC 2010 Summit presentation on using drawing in tech comm. (You may want to turn up the sound—I’m a soft-spoken kind of guy.)
Thanks to Paul Pehrson, cameraman.
Tom’s other videocasts from the STC conference are posted on his site. He does a great job coming up with thought-provoking questions and conducting the interviews.
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.
While at the STC Summit in Atlanta, I learned the results of the Intermountain Chapter elections: 21% of our chapter had voted, and they unanimously agreed to my becoming president and our current treasurer remaining in her position. Before I received that email, I told a few people that I was pretty sure that I was president. It seems picky, but I didn’t want to count that chicken before it busted free of that egg.
I talked to some other chapter leaders over the course of the conference. In those conversations, I thought it relevant to mention my position. This is a generalization, but technical communicators don’t seem to care as much about hierarchy as members of other professions do, so it’s not like I had to introduce myself as a chapter president in order to get people to talk to me. But it seemed that when it was relevant to introduce myself that way, the other person was only too happy to talk.
Frankly, I ran for president because we’ve been without one for the last year. Our treasurer has been president in the past—more than once is the impression I’ve gotten—and she has been the heart and soul of our chapter, pushing it forward from her positions on the board, believing that STC can be a significant professional asset. I was a senior in college when she asked one of the professors in the tech comm program to choose a student to build a proceedings site that could be distributed on CDs to the attendees of an Intermountain Chapter conference. I was picked, and that was my first interaction with Marj.
At the STC Summit, Tom Johnson and I gave a presentation entitled “Quick Reference Guides: Short and Sweet Technical Documentation.” Frankly, I was kind of proud of that title because it just fit within the eight-word limit.
Like usual when I’m speaking in public, I was nervous beforehand, my mouth went dry within the first few minutes, and after that I was fine.
Overall, comments were good. Someone went as far as to say that our presentation gave him the most specific information in the three years he’s attended the Summit. We had a full room, and three people watched from the hall. On the other hand, an anonymous (according to Tom) person tweeted that our presentation was more frustrating than interesting and lacked a moderator and concreteness. I’m not sure why the person chose to be anonymous; I hope it wasn’t a fear of some kind of backlash. Tom and I aren’t going to turn around and send hate-tweets.
It was a good experience, but after something like that, I feel like not presenting for the next five years. It’s a lot of buildup to that one hour, and then afterward I second-guess my performance. As Tom pointed out as we discussed it later, that piece of negative feedback did make us think about how to do better. If the world had no naysayers or detractors, maybe we’d have less motivation to improve things.
If you asked someone to name a group of people who are passionate, the first answer probably wouldn’t be “Technical communicators.”
We’re classed, to some degree incorrectly, as introverts and nerds. In this respect, we’re judged similarly to software developers. As someone joked in an STC Summit presentation, “What’s the difference between an introverted engineer and an extroverted one? The introverted engineer looks at his shoes when he’s talking to you; the extroverted one looks at your shoes.”
Introverted people aren’t normally considered passionate.
Even if you’re an extrovert, would you consider yourself passionate about technical communication?
Being passionate about your work has a couple of benefits. One, you enjoy your work, and it doesn’t feel so much like work. Second, passion demonstrates that what you do is important to you. If you don’t convey that your own job is important to you, then others will have a harder time considering it important.
Last year, I came to the Society for Technical Communication Summit as a first-timer. This time, i came as recently elected Intermountain Chapter president.
Actually, I found out from our webmaster here at the Summit what the results were. No one ran against me, so I was pretty sure of the results, but I didn’t want to make assumptions.
For me, the Summit was an overall positive experience because I learned things that I can take back to my local chapter and use to boost activity—or at least to get some attempts going. I attended much of Leadership Day and the annual business meeting, which got me thinking about what the chapter can do to help members who may not have renewed membership due to unemployment. STC has experienced a substantial shortfall this year, just as many other associations have been severely impacted by the state of the economy. I found myself discussing opinions with other chapter officers.
Leadership Day ended and the main program of the conference began with the opening general session and a keynote by Shawn Henry, an accessibility advocate and member of the W3C’s Accessibility Initiative. Her main point was not just that we should make our products accessible to those with disabilities, but that when we do it, we benefit all users and can even develop better ways of doing things in general.
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