A full-day workshop on Saturday, Nov. 26, 2011 with Manuel Gordon.

Learn how to tackle a technical writing project with confidence: from terminology to perfect paragraphs, from building your outline to polishing your final draft.

Whether you’re curious about the field of technical writing, or already making your living as a tech writer and looking to brush up on the basics, this workshop is for you.

Seating is limited, so register now for a full day of training.

Register now via PayPal

Who Should Attend?

• New and aspiring technical writers who need a solid grounding in the basic skills
• Writers, editors, translators and journalists who want to break into the field
• Successful technical writers who seek some formal training in the basics
• Professionals from other fields who have to write reports, specifications, or documentation

What Will You Learn?

1. Relearning how to write

• What is technical writing?
• Who does technical writing?
• What technical writing is not!
• Breaking the old rules
• Join Writers Without Egos

2. Writing for your readers

• Who will read your document? What do they need to do?
• Choosing words that are precise, accurate and unambiguous
• Writing sentences that can be understood immediately
• Structuring paragraphs that are easy to skim—and easy to skip!
• Using examples and avoiding abstractions

3. Converting information into documentation

• First write a plan, then write the documentation
• Using USE: Understand, Simplify, Explain
• Outlining your document
• Chunking information into manageable pieces

4. Writing with few words

• Using lists, tables and visual aids
• Creating a basic index

5. Next steps

• Finding and following documentation standards
• Career opportunities: breaking in, moving up, moving on

Got questions? Contact our Workshop Coordinator.

Where and When

This one-day workshop will be held on:

Saturday, 26 November, 2011
9:00 am to 5:00 pm.
Doors open at 8:30 am for registration.
One hour lunch break. Lunch will be provided.

Location

4100, rue André Laurendeau
Montréal QC H1Y3N6
Near Metro Préfontaine

Google Maps

Cost

$245 non-members
$215 STC members
$195 students

Lunch is included in the price of the workshop.

Register now via PayPal

Who is Manuel Gordon?

Manuel “Manny” Gordon is a technical writer, a programmer, a business analyst, and a professor of Computer Science at Vanier College in Montreal.

With more than 30 years in the IT industry, Manny has worked on every technology from mainframes to Web frames. He has acted as a consultant for many companies. His résumé is sprinkled with names such as Autodesk, Rockwell, CGI, DMR (now Fujitsu), Bell Canada, Ericsson, Amdocs and Microsoft.

As a technical writer, Manny specializes in documenting APIs, SDKs, network management products, and complex server-based software. As a business analyst, he prepares requirements specifications and other SDLC documents. As a trainer, he has delivered workshops and presentations on three continents to technical writers, developers, engineers, and business analysts.

In 2011, the Society for Technical Communication elected Manny as a Fellow, the Society’s highest honour.

What People Say about this Workshop

“Animated animators…”

“Very enthusiastic, really knowledgeable”

“Dynamic… clear… short and to the point.”

“Good presentation… good references… a lot of useful tips.”

“A great course–I learned a lot!”

“Several people I know have tried to talk me out of pursuing technical writing (because they think it’s not creative enough), but your workshop really did convince me otherwise… it really made me warm to the subject.”

“An enjoyable learning experience…”

“It’s great to take the time to focus on work when you’re not doing the work. I found it motivating; made me want to roll up my sleeves and get down to some writing.”

“Everything in this course was well done. I really liked it.”

Join us in Montreal on November 4 for a full-day workshop as we explore ways to help you get the most from your investment in content. Learn how planning and writing for reuse, streamlining your localization and internationalization processes, and effective use of templates and technology can save your company time and money.

Topics and Speakers

This workshop presents four expert speakers on a variety of topics related to content reuse. Full details follow below.

• Reusing and Improving Your Content with Pamela Kostur
• Internationalizing Your Content with Lisa Pietrangeli
• Implementing Reuse with Bryan Lynn
• Following Form with Saul Carliner

Where and When

Thursday November 4th: 9:30 a.m. until 5 p.m.
M.450 at the Grande Bibliothèque,
475, boulevard De Maisonneuve Est
Metro Berri
(Google Maps)

Cost

• STC/EAC members: $75
• Mediaville Montreal members: $85
• All others: $95

Prices are in Canadian dollars. Continental breakfast and lunch included.

Register for this full-day event today.

Reusing and Improving Your Content

Authoring with Consistency in Mind
Presenter: Pamela Kostur, Parallax Communications

Reusing content is efficient for you, for the company you work for, and for your users. Reusing content helps to ensure that content is consistent regardless of where it appears, enhancing its usability. When you reuse content instead of rewriting or replicating it, you eliminate duplications, and significantly reduce the costs to write and review content. Two (or more) writers and subject matter experts working on the same or similar content is double the cost (or more). Reusing content also facilitates translation; reused content is written, reviewed, and translated once.

Content reuse makes sense on so many levels, but it isn’t always easy to implement. Reusing content successfully requires much planning. You need to identify reuse opportunities, plan your reuse strategy, decide how to structure and write your content, create writing guidelines, and figure out how you will access your reusable content. You also need to design how your content will flow throughout your content lifecycle, from planning, writing, review, translation, and storage.

Pamela Kostur, a partner at Parallax Communications in Toronto, ON and a recognized content management expert, will describe the benefits of writing for reuse, and the process of planning and creating reusable content. Your content is a business asset; content reuse can help you make the most of it!

Internationalizing Your Content: Authoring with Localization in Mind

Authoring with Localization in Mind
Lisa Pietrangeli, Language Intelligence, Ltd.

The objective of content internationalization is to eliminate duplicate efforts and duplicate costs. Lisa Pietrangeli, Director Global Client Solutions for Language Intelligence in Rochester, NY provides you with internationalization strategies you can incorporate into your writing immediately. Starting with simple changes to the wording of your content, each step becomes more and more beneficial, leading you toward solutions like XML implementation and true reuse through single sourcing.

This discussion is structured around Lisa’s experience working with companies who are authoring content destined for localization. Lisa presents five steps to help you prepare your content for global audiences, illustrating her points through case studies that show how three individual companies incorporated best authoring practices into their processes.

Lisa expands on Pamela’s discussion about treating your content as a business asset in her examination of how content reuse affects translation reuse She will demonstrate how each step can significantly improve quality, accelerate timing and reduce the cost of your company’s localization process.

Implementing Reuse

Keeping Technology in Mind
Bryan Lynn, ThirtySix Software

Technical communicators can take advantage of content reuse to save time, save money, generate higher quality documentation, and facilitate localization. Pamela and Lisa both emphasize how successful content reuse and localization implementations require well planned, well thought out strategies. Bryan Lynn, a co-founder of ThirtySix Software in Indianapolis, IN continues the discussion by exploring technology options to support your reuse and localization strategies.

Selecting the right technology isn’t easy. There is no universal one-size-fits-all content reuse solution. There are countless vendor products, each differing in features, functionality, price, and complexity. With all these possibilities it’s easy to get lost. However, by taking a well planned and disciplined approach to evaluating these technologies, you can be sure to select the right solution for your organization.

In this presentation, Bryan outlines a practical approach for how to identify and evaluate content reuse technologies to ensure you select the one that best supports your content reuse strategy. Bryan emphasizes the importance of having a sound content strategy in place before you begin shopping for the right technology.

Following Form

Authoring with Standards in Mind
Saul Carliner, PhD, Concordia University

To round out the day, Saul Carliner, Associate Professor at Concordia University in Montreal, poses the question, “As a professional technical communicator, have you used template-based (structured) approaches to writing?”

Templates—pre-designed screen layouts—are central to many content management implementations. But how do templates really work in practice? In his session, Saul provides 11 insights into the adoption of templates that emerged from a four-year study of 11 cases of template-based documents in 10 organizations. The insights range from specific issues of testing and writing, to broad issues of the impact of templates on career opportunities for content professionals.

To pay by PayPal or credit card, please go to our registration form.

To pay by cheque, please make your cheque for the appropriate amount (STC/EAC members $75 with member number, Mediaville Montreal members $85 with member number, non-members $95) payable to Association STC-Montreal. Send it with your name, email address and contact coordinates to:

Association STC-Montreal
3198 Chèvremont
Ile Bizard, QC
H9C 2K7

Receipt of mailed cheques will be acknowledged by email.

Questions? Contact our education coordinator at education [at] stc-montreal [dot] org.

Registration closes October 29, 2010.

This approach to editing uses a step-by-step process to identify the most common obstacles to readers’ understanding and shows you quick and simple techniques to fix them. By the end of the day, you’ll know to how to edit a piece of writing without rewriting and making the author’s life miserable.

Format: One-day interactive workshop. Presented in English.

About Jim Taylor

Jim Taylor, co-founder of the publishing house Wood Lake Books, has published more than 200 titles. He has written or ghost-written 17 books, over 500 magazine articles, and over 1000 weekly newspaper columns.

Jim has offered his Eight Step Editing workshop for the Editors’ Association of Canada in major centres across Canada since 1985. He estimates that more than 3,000 editors and would-be editors have learned from his approach—but he also claims to learn as much as he teaches.

When and Where

When: Wednesday 18 November 2009, 8:30 am – 5:00 pm

Where: Ericsson, 8400 Decarie Boulevard, TMR
(Metro de la Savane)

Cost: $195 STC-Montreal and EAC members / $245 All others
$20 discount if payment is received before Friday 30 October
Workbook, lunch and refreshments included.

Download the registration form (PDF format, 57KB)

Registration: Send this form and a cheque for the appropriate amount payable to Association STC Montreal. For registrations received by email, places will be held for 1 week pending receipt of cheque.
All registrations will be acknowledged by email.

Please mail registration cheque to:
Education STC-Montreal
PO Box 56098
Montréal QC H3Z 3G3

White papers drive literally billions of dollars worth of B2B sales every year, and technical writers are ideally suited to write them. In today’s economic downturn, anyone who knows how to write white papers is positioned for better success. Technical writers who can produce effective white papers have better earning power both as employees and as freelancers.

But many writers hold themselves back, because they don’t know how to write a white paper. This workshop will show you how, and give you the tricks of the trade that took our presenter 10 years to learn.

Purpose

This full-day workshop is for technical writers who have never written a white paper, or would like to improve their white paper writing skills. After taking this workshop, you will know what a white paper is, how companies use white papers, and many of the best practices for writing white papers and managing a white paper project.

Topics

• What is a white paper anyway?
• Why technical writers are well-suited to write white papers.
• How can you tell if your company needs white papers?
• Seven things you must know before you start writing.
• The 10 deadly mistakes of white papers, and how to avoid them.
• How to format a white paper for best results.
• What about graphics, when you have no budget?
• An all-important sentence not to leave out.
• Numerous white paper samples will be presented and discussed.

Download the registration form (Word format, 48KB)

Workshop Format

This workshop will be a lecture in English with some hands-on exercises.

When and Where

When: Thursday, April 16, 2009 — 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM

Where: Ruby Foo’s Hotel, 7655 Decarie Boulevard, Montreal (Quebec) H4P 2H2 (Show map)

Pricing

STC members, EAC members,
and students with valid full-time student ID
Early Bird Registration — Until March 26, 2009 — $150.00 CDN
Regular Registration — Until April 9, 2009 — $175.00 CDN

Non-Members
Early Bird Registration — Until March 26, 2009 — $175.00 CDN
Regular Registration — Until April 9, 2009 — $199.99 CDN

About Gordon Graham

Gordon Graham has worked on more than 50 white papers since 1997, researched the field extensively, and given many presentations about white papers. His clients include Autodesk, HP, IBM, Intuit and Oracle, plus many smaller firms with big dreams. Gordon is a former member of the STC Montreal chapter, a former editor of its newsletter, and the winner of 14 STC awards. He is a partner in Gordon & Gordon and carries on business as ThatWhitePaperGuy. He is also the editor of www.SoftwareCEO.com, the world’s largest online community of software executives.

Or that you can extract images and tables from PDFs?

Or that you can set credentials and security options?

Whether you’re a technical writer, lawyer, accountant or project manager, if you make PDFs, we can show you how to make PDFs better. STC-Montreal is hosting two full-day seminars on making the most out of PDFs.

If the only thing you do with Adobe Acrobat 8 is “Save As”, you’re missing out. We’ll show you how to be more productive in a day-long course full of practical hands-on examples. Class sizes will be limited to ensure you benefit from one-on-one instruction from a certified Adobe trainer. Each participant will have use of a workstation.

PDF Basics

• Create custom job options to control quality and size for print and web
• Watermarking
• Editing and modifying

The Editorial Life-Cycle

• Use the comment tools to add comments to a PDF
• Document review for distributed teams- review tracker, importing and exporting comments, sorting and filtering and then creating reports

Distributing PDFs

• PDF properties: how the pros optimize and verify properties including version, fast web view, tagged PDF and embedded fonts
• Managing file sizes
• Batch processing: because your time is valuable

Reusing Content

• Extract images, table data and text
• Save PDFs in other formats including Microsoft Office documents
• Add PDF tags for both accessibility and for use on hand-held devices such as mobile phones and PDAs

Security and Digital Signatures

• Security settings best practices
• Document inspection and redaction
• The roaming credential system

Yes! I want to take the “A is for Acrobat” workshop

Download the registration form

When

March 28th, 2008 or March 29th, 2008

Cost

STC-Montreal Members:

Early Bird Registration – Up until March 3rd — $275.00 CDN

Regular Registration – Up until March 20 — $299.99 CDN

Non-Members

Early Bird Registration – Up until March 3rd — $299.99 CDN

Regular Registration – Up until March 20 — $325.00 CDN

The full day session includes lunch and access to a workstation with all the needed software.

Payment

Make cheques payable to Association of Technical Communication. Mail to:

STC-Montréal
PO Box 56098
Montréal, Québec
H3Z 363

Where

Collège Info-Technique
1805 Trans-Canada Highway
Dorval, Quebec H9P 1J1

Directions

If you have any questions about the workshop, please contact us at education [at] stc-montreal [dot] org.

Cancellation Policy: STC-Montreal reserves the right to cancel if registration falls short of the required minimum: cheques will be returned uncashed. Attendee cancellations are accepted up one week before a seminar. No refunds are given for cancellations received after that. Cancellations can be made by sending an e-mail to education [at] stc-montreal [dot] org.ted up one week before a seminar. No refunds are given for cancellations received after that. Cancellations can be made by sending an e-mail to education [at] stc-montreal [dot] org.

Download the registration form

This workshop is aimed at writers who want to expand their visual design skills and/or who want to work more effectively with designers, the workshop will present essential design strategies/ principles, and explore contemporary design aesthetics.

Topics covered include:

• Optimizing readability/legibility (on screen and in print)
• Enhancing usability (from a visual design perspective)
• Producing attractive layouts and colour schemes
• Exploring contemporary design aesthetics
• Managing a design critique

Format: One-day workshop, light lunch included. Presented in English.

Contact for information: Linda Aikens. If you have tried to contact us recently regarding this or any other STC event, and have not heard a reply, please try again at the email address above. We apologize for our technical glitches, and will have things sorted out soon.

About David Deskin

David Deskin is the President of Adage Media, a Montreal-based print and interactive media design firm which produces training, marketing and identity materials for major corporate and public-sector clients. David also teaches interactive media design at John Abbott College. As a usability evangelist, his leading aspirations include sharing methods for effectively optimizing: information architecture, content accessibility, interface ergonomics, aesthetics, extensibility, and the identification of user-experience imperatives. http://www.adage-media.com/

When and Where

When: 29 January 2007, 9:00am–5:00pm

Where: Ericsson 8400 Decarie, De la Savane metro or free parking

Cost: $175 STC Montreal chapter members, $195 STC members, $215 non-members

Topics include:

• Programming basics: object-oriented vs. functional, data structures, methods and functions
• The Software Development Process and the role of the technical writer
• Overview of Universal Modeling Language (UML)
• Characteristics of useful documentation
• Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and automatic document generation tools

Registration form: www.stc-montreal.org/events/registration_form_en.pdf

For information, contact us.

Speaker

Josée Laganière holds a B.A.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering and a B.Sc. in Computer Science. Josée has spent the last 10 years working as a software developer, mostly for the aeronautics industry (Lockheed Martin, Bombardier, CAE). This experience has taught her the value of technical documentation and training materials in a project’s success. She is now a technical writer with CEDROM-SNI where she is responsible for the DITA documentation system.

Format

One-day workshop, light lunch included. Presented in English.

When

20 November 2006, 9:00 – 5:00 pm

Cost

$175 STC Montreal chapter members, $195 STC members, $215 non-members

Where

Ericsson, 8400 boulevard Decarie. Free guest parking behind the building.

Learn how to build DTDs and schemas and create your own XML documents. Work with XSLs and CSSs to control format and output. Learn about DOMs and more. And don’t worry if you don’t understand all these acronyms, that’s what this workshop is for!

After this class, you will be able to:

• Identify different levels where XML brings value to the documentation production process.
• Identify the most important industry standards and explain what differentiates them.
• Identify important elements to achieve expected results and set realistic expectations.
• Explain where technical communicators fit in and where they add value.
• Understand terminology to improve communication with your development team/XML solution provider.
• Use different XML languages at a basic level. You will have what you need to pursue more technical aspects.

Two-day hands-on workshop for beginners, lunch and refreshments provided. O’Reilly book included. Presented in English.

Cost: $325 STC Montreal members, $345 STC members, $365 for non-members

Where: CDI Education on Union Street

For more information contact our Education Coordinator.

• “E-Learning – What’s Different” on January 27th
• “ABCs of Instructional Design” on January 28th

Register for both workshops and save $50 off the total. Register by January 5th and save another $15 off each workshop.

E-Learning – What’s Different

This workshop will provide guidelines for determining both your organization’s readiness for e-Learning and your own readiness to design and create it. It will focus on helping you build the specific skill set to design and develop e-Learning. It will also provide exercises to help you practice and apply new knowledge and skills.

See the flyer for more details at: e-Learning workshop

This presentation will be held in English.

Date: Friday, January 27, 2006
Registration fees: $195 for STC Montréal members, $215 for STC members not belonging to the Montreal Chapter, $235 for non-STC members

ABCs of Instructional Design

This workshop will provide an introduction to the methods and best practices in instructional design with a focus on the design of classroom training. You’ll learn how designing training is different from writing manuals, as well as the basics of instructional design, by following the standard process and practicing what you learn in hands-on exercises.

See the flyer for more details at: Instructional Design workshop

Date: Saturday, January 28, 2006
Registration fees: $195 for STC Montréal members, $215 for STC members not belonging to the Montreal Chapter, $235 for non-STC members

To register, use the form on our website: Registration Form