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I liked your post and ideas. Here are some ideas which you may consider for
your presentation:
a) Can you Review?
One of the major problems which most of us face is the quality of reviews.
In my own case it has been abysmal -- total lack of comments. Either you do
not get comments or you do not get them on time or you get comments which
are unnecessary or inappropriate (about Grammar or English). There is a
need to improve the review process and educate SMEs and others on how to do
a proper review. You will find a lot of material on Reviews in STC
Conference Proceedings.
b) Quo Vadis?
Where are we heading? Paperless? Online help? HTML Help? Web Help? CBTs?
Embedded help? Java Help? Basically, how about trying to guess which
direction your company may be taking in terms of technical communication. It
looks like everything is going to move to the Web -- then what happens. How
do we adapt to this scenario? Again, Conference Proceedings and web searches
will pay you rich dividends. (In fact I gave a presentation on Future of
Technical Communication or TC in 2000 and beyond or some such in one of our
local meetings in 1998. I would be happy to send this Power Point
presentation to you if you are interested.)
If you wish to bounce some ideas off me -- please feel free to do so
directly. I would be happy to contribute to your efforts in any way. (Yup,
a little free these days.)
Hope this helps. (P.S. I had one more idea -- but I cannot remember it!)
Guru
guru -at- bom5 -dot- vsnl -dot- net -dot- in
You wrote:
My department ... has regular meetings at which one of the main
items is an individual giving a fifteen-twenty minute work-related
presentation...
I am (cautiously) thinking about volunteering (better to volunteer than to
be pushed, or worse yet, to be ignored... :-). A presentation on technical
writing...
