STC Eastern Ontario Blog

This is one of those e-mails that circulates around the Internet every few months, passed on from person to person. The e-mail begins with “The Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are this year’s winners. Read them carefully. Each is an artificial word with only one letter altered to form a real word. Some are terrifically innovative:” or something similar and then proceeds to list a number of the supposedly winning entries. I was annoyed reading it today because several of the supposed entries were blatantly not a part of the original contests, given that they didn’t follow the contest’s rules.

There’s no such thing as “The Washington Post Mensa Invitational”. Nor is there an annual contest. On the other hand, the Washington Post does have a weekly contest called “The Style Invitational”. Each Sunday, the paper posts a new contest, the most recent one being Week 719 We Har the World. Only three of the contests have been change-a-letter type contests — in 1998, 2003, and 2007.

The Washington Post itself alludes to this e-mail in the Week 699 entry* for the Style Invitational:

It still hasn’t stopped: With mystifying regularity, we continue to receive (often passed through several mailboxes at The Post) unsolicited entries to what’s sometimes called the “Mensa Invitational,” and most recently “Change a Letter, Change a Lot”: The results of Week 271 have continued to orbit in cyberspace for almost 10 years, picking up forwarders’ own efforts along the way. We hope these lost souls find us this week. This week’s contest: Take a word, term or name that begins with E, F, G or H; add one letter, subtract one letter, replace one letter or transpose two letters; and define the new word, as in the examples above, which got ink in 1998 and 2003.

(Coincidentally, Week 699 was the first time I’d ever seen the contest before, which is why it sticks in my head.)

They got some of that wrong — week 271 wasn’t the change-a-letter contest, it was a Yogi Bera contest — but you get the point, which is that the e-mail going around is (a) very old and (b) only very slightly traceable back to the original Washington Post contests.

‘Nuff said.

* The results of Week 699 are here and here.

Via Lorelle On WordPress:

How to Write Like a Wanker (If you’re interested in blogging, Lorelle has some good posts about how to do it well so I recommend checking out the rest of her site.)

Via Fingerpainted in Blood:

My DVD Player’s User’s Manual (as Written by Chuck Palahniuk) (from McSweeney’s)

Innodata Isogen, a “provider of content supply chain solutions”, is offering two technical writing webinars:

June 28, 2007, @ 12:00PM Eastern — Technical Writing: Reducing Costs Drives Competitive Advantage for Savvy Companies. Presented by Mary Mercer, Project Manager at Innodata Isogen, and Paul Ballard, Head of Marketing Steering Group at the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators.

July 10, 2007, @ 2:00PM Eastern — Web 2.0: Understanding the Semantic Web and Its Impact on Technical Communication. Presented by Mary Mercer, Project Manager at Innodata Isogen, and Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler.

Innodata Isogen’s Knowledge Center includes a number of white papers, case studies, demos, and podcasts (including recordings of previous webinars) related to the supplying and maintenance of content. The Technical Writing section of the Knowledge Center includes a solutions sheet entitled “Technical Writing: Reducing Costs, Gaining Competitive Advantage” as well as a white paper entitled “Reducing Costs Drives Competitive Advantage for Savvy Companies“

The Editorial Gestalt by Matthew Stevens [posted 2007-06-12]

Get More Interviews with a T-Letter by Tom Murrell — “The T-letter focuses on what the initial screening person needs to know to qualify you for the next step: The interview.” [posted 2007-06-12]

Hiring a Technical Writer by Eric Ray — “At one time, Eric Ray was asked to offer his thoughts on what to look for in hiring a technical writer. Following are some of his comments…” [posted 2007-06-11]

The February 2007 issue of Intercom, the STC member magazine, featured a cover article called “Protecting Yourself from Offshoring: Advice for US-based Technical Communicators”. I had some issues with the article but kept them to myself until I read in the STC Member Forum that the Intercom editors were inviting letters to the editor and/or editorials from people about it. I wrote offering to write an editorial and then posted in the forum about the US-centricity of the article—I hadn’t planned on writing about that particular issue in my proposed editorial but still wanted to voice my opinion. The forum discussion went, well, all over the place and nowhere, at the same time. My offer of an editorial was not accepted as the editors had decided to post an excerpt from the forum discussion instead, but, after hearing that the US-centricity of the article wasn’t my main issue with it, the editors allowed me to write a “letter to the editor” that covered most of the points that would have been in the editorial.

So, loads of “Kitty mouthing off” in the June Intercom for your viewing pleasure.

I’ve been feeling lately like I’ve been sending things out to the mothership and they’ve all just been disappearing.

I submitted our chapter for an STC Community of Merit award in early April (shortly after the awards dinner). The results were supposed to be available as of the conference in May but I’ve still officially heard nothing from anyone about it. I fired off another e-mail to someone asking about it today and then found myself browsing the STC site again. Waddya know? It appears we were successful in our bid. (Ignore the fact that the page’s title tags still say “2004 Winners”.) The citation (apparently, ‘cos, well, I haven’t actually seen anything myself) says “For the successful redesign of your Web site and newsletter and celebrating 50 years as a vital STC community.”.

So, there ya go. Not quite a black hole…but I would sure like to actually get something official from someone on the subject. Makes me think about places that I’ve worked, where you find out you got a promotion or a contract extension only by reading the company newsletter.

Or so it seems.

I should really start reading my favourite blogs more often. On Thursday, in his I’d Rather Be Writing blog, Tom Johnston posted about participation statistics and enrollment percentages for the STC and several chapters. Nice to see that we’re “normal” in terms of participation but it’s still kind of sad.

Jean Weber (owner of the Technical Editors’ Eyrie site) has written a new article for TECHWR-L entitled “Working with a Technical Editor“. It gives technical writers an idea of what to expect from the experience of working with a technical editor and is an interesting read. It points to 1980 paper by Robert van Buren and Mary Ann Buehler entitled “The Levels of Edit” but the link given doesn’t work. The 34-page paper is actually located here.

I miss the old TECHWR-L site. I’ve been trying really hard to give the new one a fair go since it was unveiled earlier this year but that’s easier said than done.

It used to be an easy matter to search the mailing list archives to find a discussion pertinent to whatever debate you were having with yourself or your colleagues. Now, the search features on the site only search the non-mailing-list parts of the site—if you want to search the mailing list, you have to go to Google itself and search for your keywords along with the term techwr-l in order to turn up any mailing list results.

And while the new site offers some potentially useful new community features including personal blogs and classified ads, that very aspect means that it is prone to spam, spam, and more spam. Blog spam, comment spam, article spam, classifieds spam. For example, when I checked the site this morning, its home page was displaying 9 spam articles/blog posts. The spam makes it so much harder to actually find the little nuggets of goodness (and there definitely are some) on the site. And it gives the site a very unprofessional look. I flagged the spam in question for admin action and it appears that it’s now been taken care of by Eric Ray (site owner) but still, someone should be leaping on it without relying on other users to flag it.

Miscellaneous annoyances:

• The affiliate Amazon links that crop up, largely inappropriately, in the text of various articles and informational pages
• The layout — The pages have been designed so that you have to be viewing the site in a maximized browser window at a minimum resolution of 1024 X 768—and even then, on some pages (such as some of the event calendar pages) that just isn’t wide enough. And everything looks the same so it’s hard to distinguish articles from blog posts from anything else.
• The navigation — It’s so hard to find anything. There’s the search problem noted above but the navigation in general just has you sort of wandering around trying to get your bearings.

  A “how to use this site” page would be a great help. For example, some blog posts have ratings but there doesn’t seem to be a way for a registered user to actually rate a post so where do they come from? And people are not always using the community features appropriately. For example, some people are using their blogs as though the whole site is a forum and are posting questions there. Mind you, I blame that on the fact that everything kind of looks the same on the site so that it’s difficult for someone not aware of how the various components really should be used to understand what they should be doing.

  A sitemap would also be useful. Not to mention having a search that actually searched the entire site.

That being said, if you have the patience to wade through the site, you will actually find some interesting articles and blog posts. And the mailing list archives are frequently useful. I don’t know that I see the site living up to its potential.

Or just evolution and maturation?

On May 18, Jared Spool (of User Interface Engineering) wrote a post entitled “Where Did Technical Writing Go” in his Brain Sparks blog. It’s an interesting look at past trends in technical writing and what the future holds for the profession. It’s most interesting for the counter points of view posted in the comments.

[Found via Holly Harness's "Don't Call Me Tina" blog, which also has some interesting counterpoints to Jared's thoughts]