STC Eastern Ontario Blog

Can I get a “w00t!”?

On February 22, I wrote about the old days and I mentioned that technical writing isn’t a highly visible career in Atlantic Canada. We had an enquiry in March from a technical writer in New Brunswick about the possibility of starting an STC chapter there or somewhere in the area since the nearest chapters for an Atlantic Canadian are ours, Montreal, and the various New England chapters. We have a couple of members from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in our chapter but they obviously aren’t getting the same kinds of benefits from chapter membership that local members get, like the monthly program meetings.

I’ve had discussions recently with a couple of transplanted Atlantic Canadian technical writers and we all agreed that the profession has a very low profile in our home provinces. I’d love to help change that. So I thought I’d post a call to all Atlantic Canadian technical writers to stand up and say “Hey!” so we can get an idea of how many of you are hiding out there and whether there’s a desire for something like an STC chapter either in a specific province (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, and/or Prince Edward Island) or covering the whole region. A survey seemed a little too structured and we don’t have a decent forum that is available to non-STC-members. So, here we are. I’m hoping you’ll take the time to leave a comment and that we can turn this blog post into a pseudo forum, to at least get the conversation started.

(Note: I started to write this post in early March but, as frequently happens, I got sidetracked on the way to finishing it. A little discussion on the Canadian Issues SIG today reminded me that I had left this post unfinished so I figured it was time.)

Found via the STC Lone Writer SIG: Klingon Technical Writers. I especially like “16. Our users will know fear and cower before our suite of manuals and online help! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!” and “4. Not returning my review copies by the agreed deadline is a declaration of war. Indeed, it is a good day to die.” More fun from Documentia includes Biggest Lies Heard by Technical Writers, which was the result, apparently, of a discussion on the TECHWR-L mailing list.

There’s also a bit of a discussion going on about whether it’s unprofessional to wear headphones while at work and, if so, the etiquette of doing so. When you work in an office where people hold meetings in their cubicles because there aren’t enough meeting rooms, the decibal level can get pretty high. Without the headphones, some of us would never get anything done. Do you wear headphones while at work?

complains to Catbert about salaries in today’s Dilbert comic strip.

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut (possibly best known for the novel “Slaughterhouse-Five”) died yesterday at age 84.

One of my favourite technical writing quotes comes from his 1982 essay “How to write with style“:

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.

The remainder of the essay is one of my favourite prose-writing guides, despite his attachment to the Elements of Style.