STC Eastern Ontario Blog

Free Rice offers a multiple-choice vocabulary quiz — for every word you get right, they “donate 20 grains of rice through the United Nations to help end world hunger”. It adjusts to your abilities — if you get a word wrong, it’ll bump you down to an easier level; if you get three words in a row correct, you move up to a harder level. There are 50 levels, but they say that “it is rare for people to get above level 48″.

Hey ho ho ho.

For those of you who missed this year’s resource chat tonight, we missed you, and you missed some good leads to resources. One of the resources I learned of tonight was 20/20, a free screen capture software program.

Another program that I mentioned was The Gimp, which is free software for image editing.

There was also a book given away from my personal library (on web-based course ware development).

Consider coming out to the next meeting (theme is indexing). I’ve got a few more books to go that will be in line with the subject.

Think about your part/place in this revolution:

Saw this in Thursday’s Ottawa Citizen under Volunteer Roundup – was thinking if people wanted experience …

eMentalHealth is a website that could use your help, if you can access the Internet and want to learn more about site maintenance. They’re looking for checkers to ferret out typos, errors in fact and dead links, and communicate with the site administrator. You choose your time, day or night. Call Amy Martin at 613-723-1623 ext 264.

The latest issue of Reader’s Digest features an article called How Polite Are Canadians?:

“For our test, we travelled from Vancouver to St. John’s, to find out if the rumours are true: that courtesy is a thing of the past.”

Ottawa, with a score of 50%, ranked at the bottom of the 15 cities in which the completely unscientific social experiment took place. One of the testers remarked:

And although Ottawa scored as the least courteous city in this year’s test, at 50% it was still quite polite on a world scale and would have ranked 21st on our global test of 36 cities a year ago. Yet there was a tension in the air, especially at rush hour, when many people didn’t seem to have time to stop and help out. In fact, once when we dropped papers on the sidewalk, not only did everyone rush past without stopping, but the driver of a car wanting to get past us from the street and into the parking garage leaned on his horn while we scrambled to pick up our papers and get out of his way.

A colleague and I were talking about this Reader’s Digest article yesterday and I tried to articulate why I think the impression that Ottawa is rude is wrong. I’d tried to do that when I wrote a rebuttal to a Letter to the Editor in the Ottawa Citizen a couple of months ago but, well, I don’t know how well that went over.

The idea of extreme rudeness in Ottawa crops up regularly in articles, blogs, and discussion boards, not to mention in casual conversation. The first time I came to Ottawa, I left with the impression that the people were horribly rude and lacking in common courtesy. I resisted moving up here for more than a decade simply because I couldn’t imagine myself living among such coldness. Since moving up here, though, I’ve discovered that Ottawa is a city where you get what you put out. If you are friendly and open, you will usually get friendliness and openness in return (not counting drivers — road rage is universal LOL).

It’s as though the governmental nature of the city has crept into the bones of the residents so that they have to follow some unwritten protocol when interacting with others — if they’re unsure how to interact with you, they default to aloof (all the better to not to do anything that might offend). But rarely have I ever had my friendliness met with rudeness. So, for me, I get from the city’s inhabitants what I share with them.

What are your experiences? Do you think Ottawans are rude? Misunderstood?

Our kick-off meeting last night was a rousing success. There was a smaller turnout this year than last year but it was still larger than many previous years. It was fantastic to meet everyone and I hope you all enjoyed yourselves.

Thanks again to Don Monet of Cube Gallery for the venue — the Green exhibit is fascinating and I urge anyone who didn’t attend last night’s event to consider checking it out on your own.

And thanks to Carlos Barbosa and the staff at Big Daddy’s Crab Shack and Oyster Bar on Elgin. The food was awesome, and many people left with ample doggy bags at the end of the evening. And the Hurricane punch bowl was drained.

Via the Language Log (which has a number of eggcorn-related articles, including this 2003 one about the origin of the term), we have The Eggcorn Database, an interesting collection of (surprise, surprise!) eggcorns. They currently have information about 584 eggcorns.

I’m in the process of upgrading and redesigning the FAQ for another site I look after and decided I’d have a look around for best practices information for writing and formatting that type of document.

I ended up at the May 2004 Intercom article from Geoffrey Hart “Just the FAQs“. Ultimately, it really wasn’t what I was looking for (for a variety of reasons) but I read it anyway. I got hung on the two paragraphs where he seems to make the suggestion that using typical technical writing gerund titles rather than questions would make the information more skimmable.

Traditional FAQs present these headings as questions (“How do I create a printer configuration?), since the Q part of the acronym is, after all, “questions”. Though there’s nothing dramatically wrong with this approach, and it does have the benefit of making the FAQ seem more informal and friendly (as if you were asking the questions of someone), the repeated “How do I?” seems unnecessary, and definitely slows the act of skimming: rather than simply reading about the action or task, readers must read and mentally discard the “how do I” part for each heading. Why put them through all that work? The purpose of an FAQ, after all, is to answer questions, not ask them.

Given that technical communicators have almost universally abandoned heading styles based on questions in our documentation, and have replaced it with action headings (“Create a configuration”, “Creating a configuration”), it’s reasonable to ask why we don’t do the same in an FAQ. The best answer I can offer is what I’ve already mentioned: that doing so makes the FAQ look too much like the rest of the documentation, potentially making it seem less friendly to readers who have sought the FAQ as an alternative to the documentation. I’m not aware of any usability studies that confirm whether this reasoning is correct.

Unfortunately, that would also render the document something other than an FAQ. An FGA (frequently given answers) perhaps?

In case you feel like taking a stab at it, the Washington Post’s Style Invitational for Week 720 is “The Course of Humor Events“:

About three years back [in Week 570], we ran a great set of results to a contest asking for rhyming couplets that told about historical events. Loser Peter Metrinko, who just happened to get no ink in that contest, asks that we compile another such chronicle, but that we also allow other short formats as well, such as those above. Okay, there should be enough history to go around: Sum up a historical event in a two-line rhyme or other clever and pithy epigram.

Examples, contests rules, and the results of the Week 570 contest are available on the Washington Post page.

Did anyone else join today’s webinar from Innodata Isogen (see June 28 post)? If you did, what did you think of it?

Paul Ballard’s portion of the discussion, which addressed how technical communicators can maintain a competitive advantage within their company, and the Q&A session following the presentation were IMO much more compelling than Mary Mercer’s portion of the presentation, which dealt more with how a company can maintain a competitive advantage in their market.

I found it informative, but the recommendation to outsource and/or offshore technical writing tasks in the first part of the presentation struck me as somewhat amusing after that whole brouhaha surrounding the February article in Intercom.

A copy of the webinar’s audio will eventually be available in the Podcasts section on Innodata Insogen’s site and I’d recommend you check it out when it is.