Continually barraged with questions he did not have time to answer, the president of a condominium association, who is also a STC member, designed a website with FAQs for the residents, thus freeing-up his time to productively manage the complex.
This is just one of the many examples provided by the attendees of January’s STC meeting. The talk, given by award-winning technical communicator Mick Renner, Ph. D., energized participants to share their ideas on how technical communication can be extended to benefit their communities. When technical communicators reach out to communities the results can be dynamic and unifying. Renner gave the example of a group of people who met regularly.
Discussions tended to ramble, causing meetings to end much later than expected and leaving attendees exhausted. But creating an agenda improved the meetings by helping the group stay on track. As the meetings shortened, the participants’ attention spans lengthened.
Agendas also help speakers appear organized. This is just one of the numerous ways that technical communicators effectively use their skills.
Renner started the audience discussion section with a story:
At an auction, a French restaurant worker won the bidding on using Renner’s expertise to write his resume. As a result, both Renner and the recipient benefited. Armed with his new resume, the bidder gained a good job, and Mick Renner enjoyed helping someone land a job.
Attendees mentioned examples of how they applied their skills to the wider community. One STC member shared that she helped people in an organization get to know each other by interviewing them and suggesting they write narratives that shared a little bit about themselves.
After compiling the narratives and reading them at a meeting, people quickly became acquainted. Another member explained how she resolved a problem using her technical communication skills. She worked with a group that could not reach consensus on a volunteer project. To facilitate communication, she drafted a document and presented it to them for discussion. After talking about the drafted document, the group was able to come to a resolution. In this instance, the drafted document and the technical writer reduced conflict to help bring about consensus.
As a teacher of visual design at UC Berkeley Extension program, Renner described interesting community projects undertaken by his technical communication students, which included creating a website for dispute resolution so that tenants in a co-housing situation could reach common ground, producing a guide for a wine and food tasting event to organize it, and helping to improve a website for the SPCA.
Renner spoke about the benefits of technical communication and briefly discussed how technical communicators differ from other writers. Technical writing is egoless, whereas other writing expresses the personality of the writer. Technical writing is not self-aggrandizing; it is by nature contributory.
The possibilities of technical communication in our communities are limitless. Simply put, technical communication bridges gaps and gets people to talk to each other, help each other, and work in teams.
Christine J. Holzhauer is a laboratory scientist and technical writer. Top |
