Re: STC Letter to the Editor

["Karen L. Zorn" <klzorn -at- zorntech -dot- com>]

During al this discussion, every kind and nasty word of it, there is a BIG
misconception. The STC competition is *not* a "technical writing
competition," but a "publications, art, and online" competition. Most of the
pubs entries our chapter received *are not* software or hardware manuals,
they span the publications categories: informational, promotional, QuickRef,
manuals (software, hardware, combination, other), organizational, training,
annual report, magazines, newsletter, technical reports, trade/news
articles, scholar articles, scholar journals, books, doc sets. If you are a
newsletter editor for a car club, you could have entered the newsletter
competition. If you wrote an article on training monkeys to create art, you
could have entered the scholarly article competition. If you created a quick
reference for spitting, you could have entered the Quick Reference
competition. And so forth.

No where on the entry form does it say "technical writing competition."

Yes, Andrew, materials do need to be technically accurate, where possible.
How can you check the technical accuracy of a newsletter article on
mentoring? Or the technical accuracy of a promotional brochure on giving to
the local food bank. Yes, information needs to be correct--phone numbers,
addresses, etc. But advocating testing the published materials against the
product (what is the product of a train trip?), is not only a great expense,
but in many cases a physical improbability.

If you would make the effort and take the time to read the judging standards
for the pubs (see www.stc-phoenix.com, competitions, judging), you would see
that the criteria are grouped, starting with Content and Organization, Copy
Editing, and *finally* Visual Design. Within each group are the individual
criteria, which require a strongly disagree, disagree, agree, strongly
agree, or not applicable evaluation.

As a judge, I have put in hours, uncompensated, evaluating the materials
assigned to me. It is something I wanted to do and am learning from the
experience. I am not an STC "elder."

Slinging mud, expounding the worthless of a competition you know little or
nothing about, ranting on and on about technical writers are not writers
(people you have never met or evaluated their work), and promoting oneself
as the guru of technical standards is a smoke screen. Until you have a
complete, comprehensive, technically accurate understanding of the
competition, its standards and criteria, either advance the discussion in a
positive direction or get off the soapbox. In other words, practice what you
preach so loudly.

BTW, I don't personally know of a competition of any kind where you can
enter for free. There is no free award (lunch). Perhaps the Nobel, but you
don't enter personally, you are selected to compete.

Karen L. Zorn
STC-Phoenix Pubs Competition Manager
Mesa, AZ


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