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> Elna Tymes said:
>
> >Submitting your manual to an STC competition, while
> >important for PR purposes ... doesn't establish your
> >content as "good" except by whatever standards the local STC
> evaluation
> > team is using this year....
>
Then Kris Oberg said:
> Exactly my point. We, the "community," need to develop criteria for
> determining whether content is good or bad. We can't rely on others to
> do
> this for us.
>
And I add:
I'm afraid I don't agree with the arguments being made here.
Elna's comments on the STC ITCC make it sound like a whimsical event in
which local writers decide on arbitrary criteria, then rate their
entries in accordance with those. Kris adds to the confusion by
implying that STC does not represent "the community."
As an experienced publications judge at both the local (in our
case statewide) and international levels, I can attest to the fact that
neither of these things is true. Local competitions are largely
constrained by the same rules as the international, and a great deal of
work has gone into developing objective, experience-based criteria
against which the entries in each category are (or should be) scored.
Some revisions in the judging guidelines are inevitable over time, but
the overall direction is toward continuous improvement in the judging
process.
On the second point, STC counts around 17,000 working technical
communicators among its members. So how can anyone see it as something
_other than_ that "community" that should be developing "criteria for
determining whether content is good or bad"? IMO, STC is US, not a
group of "others."
Sure, engineering types don't always recognize the STC name.
(That's one area where IEEE SIGDOC has it over us--engineers _always_
recognize that name!) Instead of complaining that some nebulous tech
writing "community" ought to be developing standards, why can't we all
support the real efforts that ARE being made in that direction? If STC
has name-recognition problems, then maybe some PR work is what's needed,
rather than a new grass-roots effort to reinvent the wheel.
