STC Montreal

Writer and blogger Emru Townsend, who was diagnosed with leukemia in mid-December, has found a matching donor for a desperately-needed bone marrow transplant.

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By Geoff Hart

There’s a famous saying that meetings are “places where minutes are saved and hours wasted,” something that anyone who’s survived an endless series of workplace meetings can attest to. Indeed, most workers eventually come to dread the prospect of yet another meeting. In my experience as the victim of endless meetings and as an avid observer of the travails of a great many technical communicators, it’s become painfully clear to me how few people ever learn to organize and run an effective meeting.

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By Everett Larsen

Regulated industries — such as pharmaceuticals, brewing and distilling, or nuclear power — present special challenges for technical writers and information developers. These regulated industries have conflicting usability and compliance requirements, and within all of them the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) is the primary document that provides both instructional content and regulatory compliance.

Successful SOP writing comes from balancing the competing needs of two groups of users: the regulatory community and the manufacturing process operators. A clear, concise SOP that fully focused on the information needs of its process users would almost certainly generate violations or warnings from its regulators. Conversely, an SOP that fully met a complete set of regulatory guidelines would be almost unreadable by anyone but a regulator, and would be useless for guiding any manufacturing process.

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A longtime friend of STC-Montreal needs our help.

Emru Townsend — who you may know as a magazine writer, technical communicator, blogger, and husband and father — was diagnosed with leukemia in December of 2007. He has been in and out of hospital for chemotherapy repeatedly over the last few months. But this is a temporary measure; Emru faces a increased risk of the leukemia coming back, no matter how successful chemotherapy is.

But you may be able to help him.

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By Jim Royal

Building a web site is a multidisciplinary job. And the skills required vary widely depending on the task at hand. The staff you’d need to hire to create a media-rich web site for a consumer product would be very different from the people you’d need to build an documentation portal.

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By Howard Richler

One of the common processes in semantics is that of generalization. A word starts having a specific application, but its sense broadens over time.

For example, originally a mill was a place where you made meal and a barn was a place you stored barley. Similarly, a pen knife was originally restricted to fixing quill pens and paper referred to a sheet made from papyrus. Over time the meaning of all these words widened.

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