Re: STC - academia or real-world?

[Elna Tymes <etymes -at- LTS -dot- COM>]

Garret Romaine wrote:

> Not to blow our horn too much, but the Willamette Valley chapter based in
> Portland, Oregon is incredibly diverse and thriving, adding 10-12 members
> per month. We have active Special Interest Groups for Entry Level,
> Contractors, Online Help, and Managers, and our program meetings have
> attracted up to 80 attendees at times. Life is good here.

There are good STC chapters and poor ones.  Silicon Valley, for instance, has an
STC chapter that, in my experience, attracts by far more headhunters and
students than people actually working in the field, but the San Francisco
chapter appears to have interesting programs.

I keep giving STC a chance every 5 or so years, and each time I pay my dues I
wind up sorry I spent money on them.  I get far more value out of freebie
technical publications, or certain conferences (the "A" list changes from year
to year), or things like TECHWR-L.  Granted, there are occasional bright spots
in STC publications, but not often enough to warrant the dues.

> Also, any good professional organization sponsors research, in order to
> drill down into the details. Where would we be without a solid,
> research-based understanding of human factors, interface design, and adult
> education?

And the national STC publications are full of the results of STC's funding
effort$.  The kinds of studies that the field has been demanding frequently cost
more than STC can afford; the point I made in an earlier post is that it
therefore falls to us as individuals and private organizations to get some of
this research done, as we can.

Let me expand on that point.  It has long been recognized that
engineers/programmers can get more visibility within their professional
environment by publishing papers describing new technology, net methods, etc.
It frequently benefits the companies where they're working to sponsor the
publication of these papers, too.  Lots of us who have been in this business for
a while can attest to the fact that creation of papers destined for professional
engineering publications is an activity that's alive and well; some of us have
even helped write these very papers.

So why don't we do studies of this sort for the "professional" publications in
the technical writer profession? Because there are very few such publications,
and most of them are controlled by STC, and STC doesn't have the professional
cachet of ACM or IEEE.  However if you can get a company to underwrite some
research done by a bona fide research organization (my own experience was with
the University of Washington's tech writing dept.) you also get the benefit of
the company's ability to place the study results in some publication that DOES
have higher status.

Elna Tymes
Los Trancos Systems

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