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Subject:STC Membership, Publications, Etc. From:"George F. Hayhoe" <george -at- GHAYHOE -dot- COM> Date:Sun, 10 Jan 1999 12:42:46 -0500
In the past few days, there have been several postings about
STC, its membership, and its publications. I make no claim
to be unbiased, but here are some facts.
1. More than 90% of the Society's 21,000+ members are
full-time practitioners. A large proportion of the academic
members are also active practitioners.
2. In the past few years, STC's _Intercom_ has evolved from
a newsletter into a magazine chock full of interesting and
useful information. The articles are brief and practical,
but most are based on the author's personal experience
rather than on research.
3. The journal, _Technical Communication_, has likewise
evolved during the past three years. All articles are
peer-reviewed (more than half the peer reviewers are
practitioners), and articles are typically grounded in
original research or in the theory and research of others in
the field. But to be accepted for publication, a manuscript
must be clearly applicable to practitioners.
The February 1999 issue, which will mail before the end of
January, contains the following articles and columns, most
of which provide some answers to questions heard on this
listserve in the last week or two.
--"Print to Online: Conflicting Tales of Transition" by
Louise Rehling relates the experience of a major company
transitioning from print to online documentation and offers
detailed suggestions for managing that process.
--"China is Hungry: Technical Communication in the People's
Republic of China" by Patricia Tegtmeier, Sylvia Thompson,
Ron Smith, Deb L. Scroggs, and Sam Dragga describes the
state of our profession in China as observed by a group of
practitioners and academics on a recent trip sponsored by
the People to People program.
--"The Logical and Rhetorical Construction of Procedural
Discourse" by David Farkas is an important theoretical work
about how to write effective procedures that is full of
practical examples and applications, most taken from online
help.
--"Re-engineering Online Documentation: Designing
Examples-based Online Support Systems" by Martin D. Tomasi
and Brad Mehlenbacher offers a method for designing and
writing online documentation that is quite different from
the usual model.
--"Typographic Dimensions and Conventional Wisdom: A
Discrepancy?" by Karel van der Waarde provides the results
of research on whether actual documents reflect the
generally accepted guidelines for x-height, line length, and
line spacing.
--"The Roots of SGML: A Personal Recollection" by Charles F.
Goldfarb recounts the beginnings of the world's first
mark-up language by one of its originators.
--"Realising the Full Potential of the Web" by Tim
Berners-Lee offers some observations about the World Wide
Web's possibilities by its inventor.
--"The Year 2000 Problem: Background and Opportunities for
Technical Communicators" by Deborah S. Ray and Eric J. Ray
(whose names should certainly be familiar to folks on this
list) is the third installment in their "Technology Reviews"
column, and it addresses fundamental aspects of the Y2K
problem, including identifying what compliance really is,
understanding how the problem came about, understanding what
the real issues are, and realizing what solutions exist.
--Extensive book reviews address 10 recent books of interest
to technical communicators, including the new edition of the
_Microsoft Manual of Style_ and books on SGML, HTML, and XML
(Avon Murphy is book review editor). "Recent and Relevant"
contains abstracts of articles on technical communication
and related fields appearing in recent issues of other
journals (Rita Reaves edits that column).
People are entitled to think as they wish, but I don't think
it's accurate to say that STC and its publications are
academic or out of touch with the needs of practitioners.
That simply doesn't square with the facts. If you haven't
picked up an issue of _Technical Communication_ in the past
few years, you ought to take a close look at what you've
been missing.
