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Subject:Re: STC - academia or real-world? From:"Porrello, Leonard" <lcporrel -at- ESSVOTE -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 8 Jan 1999 11:28:00 -0600
The distinction between the academic and "real" world is spurious. Information about human cognitive functioning is as real and vital to technical writing as information gets, and much of this information comes from the academy. This is well evidenced in Schriver's book on design, Hoft's book on internationalization, and an article on gender bias in sewing machine manuals which was published in an STC journal sometime last year (sorry, I don't recall when or the title). All of these works, as far as I can tell, were generated in academic settings. All of them very much pertain to the things I do everyday as a technical writer. When it comes to discovering issues relating to design and human response, arguably, no place else is as well equipped and able to discover what works and what doesn't than academia. Academicians have no marketeers with which to contend and no corporate traditions and conventions to uphold. In other words, they can be objective.
_If_ there is a problem with academia's role in the technical writing community, it is that we do not lean on academia enough, we fail to let academia know what we need.
Leonard Porrello
Election Systems and Software
Information Sieve
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From: garret.h.romaine
Sent: Friday, January 08, 1999 10:25 AM
To: TECHWR-L; LCPORREL
Subject: STC - academia or real-world?
John Gilger writes:
> How many of these 17,000 actually work in the technical writing
> community OUTSIDE of academia?
>
> I think that that the STC would become more useful and better
> known if their publications were more oriented to real world, working
> tech communicators rather than a publishing forum for grad students.
