STC-Montreal Article | Posted October 19th, 2008
As technical writers, we always need to consider our audience.
This link below is an amusing and instructive anecdote about the current financial crisis. It is also a tremendous lesson in communication: Know your audience, and speak to them in their terms.
http://bygonebureau.com/2008/10/01/the-financial-crisis-as-explained-to-my-fourteen-year-old-sister/
STC-Montreal Article | Posted September 30th, 2008
By Geoff Hart
Everyone’s heard about the ignorant tourist who is visiting a foreign country and having difficulty communicating with the natives. The tourist tries to communicate in English, our modern lingua franca, and when the native fails to understand, the tourist repeats exactly the same sentence, but louder and slower. After all, everyone must speak English, so the problem must be volume and pacing. At best, both people shrug, smile placatingly, and move on, having failed to communicate; at worst, tempers rise, and both leave with greatly reduced respect for the other person’s culture.
STC-Montreal Article | Posted June 5th, 2008
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.
STC-Montreal Article | Posted April 25th, 2008
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.
STC-Montreal Article | Posted April 9th, 2008
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.
STC-Montreal Article | Posted March 28th, 2008
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.
STC-Montreal Article | Posted January 15th, 2008
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.
STC-Montreal Article | Posted June 3rd, 2006
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.
STC-Montreal Article | Posted June 1st, 2006
By Cindy Currie, STC Fellow and Region 1 Director
It’s a brand new STC year! Our new President, Paula Berger, has chosen the slogan “The New World of STC” for this year. And a new world it is!
STC-Montreal Article | Posted May 17th, 2006
By Michael Samotis, C.A., C.F.P.
An issue that is frequently faced in the software and technical writing businesses is the question of whether an individual is an employee or self-employed. Fortunately, there are guidelines that the federal and Quebec governments have issued to help in determining an individual’s employment status. In this article, I will describe these criteria and discuss the risks of being too aggressive with respect to considering employees as self-employed individuals.
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