Ars Communica

Reposted from notebook.stc.org.

A major paradigm shift within a large organization is always challenging, even when you correctly identify the need for change and the appropriate solution. You must select the right vendor, manage the shift while meeting existing deadlines, and gain buy-in from all groups and participants. On the vendor side, you must partner with the corporation, devise a strategy that ensures you can meet existing deadlines simultaneously working towards the new model, and communicate effectively with all participants to facilitate acceptance of the new model.

Join Meryl Natchez on Thursday, 7 April, from 4:00-5:00 PM EDT (GMT-4) for Managing Major Corporate Change—Two Perspectives. This webinar details how a global shipping company made the shift from standard to single source documentation development. It covers both the corporate and vendor point of view, from analysis through implementation, including lessons learned by both the company and TechProse, the vendor selected to implement the single source solution.

Original link: http://notebook.stc.org/upcoming-webinar-on-7-april/

Written by Lynne Wright.

Dinner-seminar featuring Poppy Quintal, at Au Bistro Gourmet, March 29, 2011.

A gregarious and diverse crowd packed out the venue to hear veteran technical editor Poppy Quintal demonstrate what sets her ilk apart as a special breed.

Too often, project managers assume that, by the time a manual has cycled through writing and technical review, all it needs is a quick proofread to catch typos and other minor errors. But an editor with a trained analytical eye can ferret out a myriad of more insidious problems, by checking mind-numbing details like part numbers and other values that are peppered across hundreds of pages; making sure that tables are complete and easy to interpret; verifying that illustrations are inserted in the correct locations; and ensuring that information is coherent across the manual.

Photos and the presentation slides are available below.

Aside from possessing near super-human acuity, the technical editor’s toolkit includes:

• Knowing how and when to lobby for enough time to comb through and fix highly problematic documents; and when to accept that “good enough” will have to do.
• Being proficient at both copy editing (a rule-based check of grammar, spelling, punctuation, and basic consistency of style/presentation); and substantive editing (a more comprehensive analysis of how well the content delivers in terms of effectively communicating information to the user; including how the information is organized and structured, whether information is complete and pertinent, usefulness of the table of contents and index, and whether language usage and writing style is appropriate to the audience).
• Knowing how to pick your battles and when to let go. Save your energy for the important stuff; it’s not worth inviting a bout of fisticuffs by challenging a writer to an ideological duel over the finer points of style.
• Being able to see the forest and the trees: You need laser-like focus that can be sustained across reams of complicated details, but also need to recognize whether all those details add up to create an intact and consistent big picture.
• Being confident in your ability to adapt and learn. You don’t necessarily need to be a subject matter expert to do an effective edit. If you roll up your mental sleeves and ask engineers for clarification when you need it, you’ll build up knowledge as you go along. And often, being new to the material allows you to see things that others have missed, and to approach the material from the perspective of an end user.
• Knowing where errors commonly lurk. Be diligent about checking the types of details that reviewers often gloss over, including verifying unit conversions (for example, values for degrees Celsius versus degrees Fahrenheit); ensuring that diagrams are labeled accurately; making sure that illustrations show what is cited in the text and/or figure title; and verifying cross-references.

Using examples that showed the types of mistakes that can slip past reviewers, and how seemingly minor errors can have dramatic consequences, Poppy proved that a thorough technical edit is a crucial part of the document production cycle… and that doing the job properly requires a formidable set of skills.

Download the Presentation (PDF format, 123 KB)

Reposted from notebook.stc.org.

All of us have had to convert from tool X to tool Y countless times in our careers for various reasons. Careful planning and upfront analysis can ensure that the conversion will go quicker and easier than if you just practice “ready, fire, aim.” Join Ed Marshall and STC for the live web seminar Best Practices for Converting From Tools on Wednesday, 6 April from 1:00-2:00 PM EDT (GMT-4) for a look at on the best practices that apply, regardless of the tools involved.

Learn how to select the best test documents for your trial conversions, how to prepare your files for trial conversions and what to check in the output, and the importance of documenting the conversion steps and good ways to document them. By following the practices discussed, you should find your conversion process will go much more smoothly.

Original link: http://notebook.stc.org/upcoming-webinar-on-6-april/

You are invited to the Society for Technical Communication’s 52nd annual conference, Building Better Solutions: A Skills Symposium! This conference is brought to you by the Rochester Chapter of the Society for Technical Communicaion, in partnership with the Rochester Institute of Technology, Department of Communication.

Spectrum 2011 will be held on the RIT campus on Friday, April 1, 2011, and will feature knowledgeable presenters speaking on topics of interest to everyone from instructional designers and information architects to technical writers and editors. Several vendors of note will also be on-site demonstrating their innovative products and services.

Keynote speaker Diane Gayeski is internationally recognized for her pioneering work in new management approaches and technologies for organizational communications and learning. She will be sharing her insights from over 25 years of research and consulting on how to re- frame your communication skills and products as business assets.

Please join us at this unique event, which promises to be both educational and exciting! Register online at http://stcrochesterspectrum2011.eventbrite.com/

Registration Fees:
Member (Local): $130.00
Member (Other STC Chapter): $150.00
Non-Member: $170.00

Visit Spectrum 2011 on Facebook or at stc-rochester.org for more information about the conference and about the Rochester chapter of STC.

For additional questions about the conference, contact:
Marilyn Woelk or Jeffrey Mehr, Spectrum co-chairs: spectrum [at] stc-rochester [dot] org
Kait Schuh, Spectrum public relations chair: adv [at] stc-rochester [dot] org

Spectrum 2011
Friday, April 1, 2011
8:00am – 6:00pm
CIMS Building Rochester Institute of Technology
111 Lomb Memorial Drive Rochester, NY 14623

Reposted from notebook.stc.org.

Join Ben Colburn on Thursday, 17 March, from 4:00-5:00 PM EDT (GMT-4) for the live web seminar Single Sourcing Sans a CMS.

His company has developed a suite of tools and techniques, leveraging open-source, off-the-shelf, and home-grown technologies, to fill requirements in their development process that would otherwise be part of CMS functionality. In this session, learn the company’s current development process, their vision for a future process, and their strategy for building training content using non-specialized DITA 1.1. Discuss the tools and techniques used to develop training in multiple languages for ILT and eL environments.

Continue reading »

Reposted from notebook.stc.org.

What is open source and why should you care?

You use a variety of writing tools to produce technical documentation. Some of them are brilliant, and we couldn’t live without them. Some of them are … not so brilliant. So why not replace the not-so-brilliant ones with ones that are free to own, free to use, free to share, and also top quality?

Continue reading »

In the aftermath of a magnitude 8.9 earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Japan, the urgent need for humanitarian aid is becoming more clear with every passing hour.

The BBC reports (at the time of this posting) that “more than 10,000 people may have lost their lives in one of the worst affected regions, the northern coastal area of Miyagi. Huge numbers of survivors are gathered in emergency shelters, some with no heat.”

Food, water and fuel are reported to be running short in some parts of Japan and, as large swathes of the country remain without power, the government is beginning a programme of rolling electricity blackouts.

See dramatic before-and-after photos of affected areas of Japan at Australia’s ABC News.

STC-Montreal encourages you to donate to aid the disaster relief effort. If you are uncertain which charities to send your money, we suggest:

• Canadian Red Cross www.redcross.ca
• Médecins Sans Frontières www.msf.ca
• Oxfam oxfam.ca

Reposted from notebook.stc.org.

Writing documentation is one task; getting your end users to use it is another. End users accustomed to asking questions directly to the development staff need to be encouraged to use the newly available documentation. Making documents easy to find and easy to use is just as important as knowing and writing to your audience. On Thursday, 10 March, Kimberly Lacerte presents Helping Internal Users Embrace Self-Service Documentation, from 4:00-5:00 PM EST (GMT-5) to help you with those tasks.

Continue reading »

Reposted from notebook.stc.org.

Controlled English is a method of writing that makes technical English easy to understand. The adaptation of a controlled language stimulates the global acceptance of technical documentation as it improves readability and translatability, and prevents misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Join content quality advocate Berry Braster of Tedopres for the live web seminar Controlled Language on Wednesday, 9 March, 1:00-2:00 PM EST (GMT-5).

Berry will explain the benefits of controlled authoring using case studies; show how overall cost, time to market, and content volume will be reduced; and demonstrate how you can save considerably on translations—up to 40 percent per language!

Original link: http://notebook.stc.org/upcoming-webinar-on-9-march-controlled-language/

Written by Lynne Wright.

With a warm panache that matched the cozy flair of the venue, Andy Gural served up a bellyful of juicy tips during his dinner presentation on how to make your Website attract and hook the employers that you want to work for.

About 20 people attended the event at Au Bistro Gourmet, where Andy described how to make your website hook the employers that you want to work for.

Photos and the presentation slides are available below.

Continue reading »

Former STC Montreal president, Manuel (Manny) Gordon has been elected as a Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication (STC).

In his technical communication work, Manny primarily works at the most technical end of computer documentation. He documents SDKs and writes programmer references. He has worked with many major companies in the Montreal area and, in the process, has helped organizations communicate more effectively not only by translating the work of technical experts for others but, also helping his clients evaluate what they intend to communicate and to whom.

Continue reading »

Editors Association of Canada: Quebec/Atlantic Canada Branch

Continue reading »

Reposted from notebook.stc.org.

Do you tend to ramble? At crucial moments, when one should be focused and must speak with emphasis, most people—even those who are highly trained and well educated—frequently diminish their impact by going into an infinite ramble or being too feeble and perfunctory. V. J. Singal presents Conquering the Pervasive Disease of Rambling: How to Emphasize Your Point in Three Sentences, Thursday, 3 February from 4:00-5:00 PM EST (GMT-5). He provides examples of incidents where rambling led to embarassment, followed by analysis and discussion of several real-world examples of top-notch communicators emphasizing an important point in just three sentences. Find out how to curtail rambling with V. J. Singal and STC.

Original link: http://notebook.stc.org/upcoming-webinar-on-3-february/

STC Toronto invites you to join host Bernard Aschwanden as he gathers together industry leaders to show you how DITA works when used with leading tools from companies like Adobe, JustSystems, Quark, and others. Get the inside scoop on this technology from people who know it best.

Continue reading »

STC announced by email that Society President Michael Hughes has resigned. Hillary Hart becomes President and will serve in the position through her elected term (May 2012).

Continue reading »

Reposted from notebook.stc.org.

Despite the word “project” in the name, Project Phoenix is not really a project or a series of projects. Rather, it is shorthand for the revitalization and renewal of STC. One of the results of these efforts is the launch of a new website supported by comprehensive changes in the way STC interacts with members, communities, and external audiences, and how it handles internal processes.

Continue reading »

Reposted from notebook.stc.org.

STC has not one but two great webinars this week for members!

First up on Tuesday, 25 January, 1:00-2:00 PM EST (GMT-5), is Neil Perlin and Creating Visual Help and Training Using Adobe Captivate (rescheduled from 8 December 2010). Software training has long been text-based, but think how much more effective it could be to have someone actually “walk you through the steps” on the screen. That’s where Captivate comes in, letting you create that “someone.” In this webinar, you’ll take a look at Captivate’s major features, some in detail and some in summary due to time limits. You’ll then create a quick demonstration movie to show the major features in action. Finally, Neil will briefly review what’s new in Captivate 5.

On Wednesday, 26 January, 1:00-2:00 PM EST (GMT-5), John Hedtke explores the decisions surrounding freelancing in Freelance vs. Captive: Making an Informed Decision. Not everyone is suited for freelance work . . . but neither is everyone suited for captivity. This webinar will identify the pros and cons for captivity (i.e., “full-time” or “permanent” employment) and freelance work, then shows how to identify your personal employment goals and how to fit these into the pros for each career path. There will also be suggestions for those who haven’t tried freelance work yet on how to get started freelancing on the side, something that could be of great value in today’s economy.

Original link: http://notebook.stc.org/two-great-stc-webinars-this-week/

STC India posted a pair of intriguing articles on its web site by Sumedh Nene about the benefits and challenges of moving to Canada and entering the workforce here.

Nene is the Mentorship Manager for STC India and Events Manager for STC Toronto, and has been working in Canada a little over a year. Following are excepts from his two articles:

Continue reading »

Reposted from notebook.stc.org.

Can adopting DITA and a CMS allow you to create dynamic, multi-modal training? Find out how one company is delivering classroom-based courseware manuals and high-fidelity, SCORM-compliant online training built from a single source of content.

STC and Patrick Quinlan present Delivering Multi-Modal Training, taking place Wednesday, 12 January from 1:00-2:00 PM EST (GMT-5). In this webinar, Quinlan demonstrates the products of Citrix Education’s dual-modality output. He also reviews three recent DITA-based development projects:

• Replacing DTP with DITA. In this project, the team leveraged DITA, but followed DTP-style processes, design, and practices. A CMS was not available.
• Write for online, use offline. In this project, the team leveraged DITA to create content fit for online delivery that was equally effective offline. A CMS was not available.
• Leverage someone else’s DITA. In this project, the team leveraged DITA from other teams to speed development of multi-modal training. A CMS was used.

Quinlan provides a project overview, highlights changes in the development environment, reviews the effort required to produce the desired output, and discusses project timelines and resources. He closes by looking forward at leveraging existing tools and infrastructure to deliver content in new ways, including ePub and mobile learning.

Original link: http://notebook.stc.org/upcoming-webinar-on-12-january-delivering-multi-modal-training/

Reposted from notebook.stc.org.

If a tree falls in a forest with no one around, does it make a sound? If a training course you create could save your company, but know one knows that you did it, does that make a sound? Make sure it does with self-marketing.

Continue reading »