Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
February/March 2009
| Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter February/March 2009 |
The March meeting is on Wednesday, March 28, 2009, from 6:00 pm to 8:30 pm at the Elephant & Castle in San Francisco's financial district. For details about the location and instructions for purchasing tickets, visit www.stc-sf.org/stc-meetings.htm.
You don't need to be an academic to read a research article. Even if you don't read every word, you can find support -- and new directions -- for your thinking.
As technical communicators at work (aka practitioners), we make countless decisions about document design, sentence structure, vocabulary, typology. Many of these choices we base on our education, training, corporate guides, or department policies. But many we just make up based on what feels right to us--on our "practitioners' lore."
Basing our work on research has always been vital to technical communication. It can ground our decisions in reality, introduce new possibilities, and enliven our style committee meetings.
This presentation explores how we can improve our work by reading research articles. Susan Becker uses as examples several guidelines from the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Style Guide for Voting System Documentation and shows how they were developed through a process of reading the research, reviewing the current accepted guidelines, and critiquing sample documents.
Susan C. Becker is an Information Developer at IBM. She has worked as an independent contractor and technical communication consultant in San Francisco for over 20 years. Susan co-authored the Style Guide for Voting System Documentation for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). She is a new STC Associate Fellow, past president of the San Francisco chapter, and a member of the Usability Professionals' Association (UPA). Her online and print documentation have received local STC awards.