http://tc.eserver.org/authors/Hayhoe,_George_F A bibliography of works by Hayhoe, George F in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Hayhoe,_George_F http://tc.eserver.org/32698.html http://tc.eserver.org/32698.html Why should technical communicators be interested in ISO's user documentation standard? Hayhoe discusses the various advantages of this new systems and software engineering standard, and makes an argument for how the profession can gain by adhering to it. http://tc.eserver.org/31762.html http://tc.eserver.org/31762.html Who to target with your email, how long it should be, and what should and shouldn't go in it so that it can be an effective means of communication for you. http://tc.eserver.org/30233.html http://tc.eserver.org/30233.html To prepare today's students for the world of work, language arts curricula should include reading and writing about technical subjects as well as about works of literature. Many students have difficulty comprehending computer documentation, safety instructions, and product manuals. They are also ill prepared to do the kinds of writing and speaking required on the job. This panel will address the following topics, as well as others raised by the audience. http://tc.eserver.org/30081.html http://tc.eserver.org/30081.html This session will help participants understand how to write and submit a manuscript for publication in Technical Communication. It covers the types of articles the journal publishes, its audience, and suggestions for choosing topics, doing research, and preparing a manuscript. http://tc.eserver.org/30082.html http://tc.eserver.org/30082.html This session will help participants understand the process for reviewing manuscripts submitted to http://tc.eserver.org/29922.html http://tc.eserver.org/29922.html To date, STC has not been very aggressive or innovative in terms of electronic delivery of educational content to our members or others in the profession. Aside from telephone seminars/Webinars and the online availability of articles from Intercom and the journal, the Society has largely ignored the methods that its members, their companies, and other professional organizations are using to deliver content to stakeholders. Because only a fraction of the membership attends the annual conference and regional/chapter conferences, and because the Society is attempting to reach out to members of the profession outside North America, it is imperative that STC pursue other means of offering educational opportunities. By truly leveraging the power of the Web and other emerging technologies, STC can address a worldwide audience and provide significant educational offerings to members and prospective members alike. http://tc.eserver.org/28762.html http://tc.eserver.org/28762.html Keith Hoffman, president of the Madison Wisconsin Four Lakes Chapter, talks with George Hayhoe, editor of the Technical Communication Journal, about the emergence of technical communications in China and Korea, and the forces behind the push for technical communicators. http://tc.eserver.org/28549.html http://tc.eserver.org/28549.html The Society for Technical Communication has good reason to be proud of its two major publications, Intercom and this journal. Both have garnered significant awards from the annual APEX competitions, and both serve important purposes. But why do we publish both a journal and a magazine? How did they develop? Why should the STC publish a journal at all? http://tc.eserver.org/26462.html http://tc.eserver.org/26462.html On the morning of 29 August, Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama with winds clocked at 140 miles (225 km) per hour and more than a foot (30 cm) of rain. Although the hurricane spared New Orleans, the major population center of the area, a direct blow, the storm surge caused several of the cityï¿s levees to fail, flooding 80% of the city with up to 20 feet (6 m) of water fouled by sewage, oil, and other pollutants. It will be many years before the coastal areas of southeast Asia and the U.S. Gulf Coast have rebuilt and recovered from this year's disasters. Likewise, it will take time for us to create better disaster plans and disseminate them to the public, and for the value of those plans to be perceived. Neither of these facts makes the rebuilding, recovery, and planning any less necessary. We must do all we can to ensure that they happen as quickly as possible. We should see clearly that we can't afford to do any less. http://tc.eserver.org/26211.html http://tc.eserver.org/26211.html More than 90% of <em>Technical Communication</em> readers are informed practitioners--writers, editors, illustrators, designers, trainers, and project managers. About 10% are teachers and students. They come from diverse backgrounds as well as from technical communication programs. http://tc.eserver.org/26210.html http://tc.eserver.org/26210.html Some team members wanted the guide to be extremely prescriptive of format and content. Others insisted that it offer only minimal guidelines. A compromise was unacceptable to either side. http://tc.eserver.org/25734.html http://tc.eserver.org/25734.html Whether articles have been applied on the job or have simply expanded our mastery of the field, how can we tell which articles practitioners find useful? This is the question I've wrestled with over the past three months. Unfortunately, supplying an answer isn't as easy as asking the question. http://tc.eserver.org/24946.html http://tc.eserver.org/24946.html Online documentation... usability testing... multimedia—new tools and processes to support these and other technologies flood the technical communications field. All technical communicators face the challenge of keeping up with these developments. Freelancers, however, face a special challenge: they must be prepared to use any technology and must provide their own training. In this panel, four experienced freelancers discuss proven solutions to the professional development challenge. http://tc.eserver.org/24778.html http://tc.eserver.org/24778.html Using currently available products, technical communicators can produce a single hypertext file which can be read on the Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX platforms. Three multiplatform online document solutions will be demonstrated during the session, and a tool selection methodology will also be presented. http://tc.eserver.org/22475.html http://tc.eserver.org/22475.html Having lived and worked on both sides of the academe-industry border, I've thought a great deal about the negative attitudes held by so many who live in both of these parts of the larger world of technical communication. http://tc.eserver.org/22476.html http://tc.eserver.org/22476.html Like their colleagues who produce paper documents, few help developers are aware of the research that has been done on topics relevant to the information products they design. This article describes four recent studies that are relevant to help developers, and suggests how help developers can use the knowledge gained from those studies to improve the performance support systems they build. The fact, however, is that there is a lot of good research that addresses topics of concern to practitioners in our field. Moreover, the best research reports always include implications for practice. Finally, if we ignore research results, we won’t learn what we need to know so that we can stop spending all our time putting out fires. http://tc.eserver.org/21545.html http://tc.eserver.org/21545.html This encyclopedia article provides engineering managers with a detailed overview of the process for developing online documents. http://tc.eserver.org/21544.html http://tc.eserver.org/21544.html Internet-based distance learning programs make it possible for technical communicators located anywhere in the world to participate in graduate courses in their field. But are these graduate programs as rigorous as those offered through traditional educational venues? Do they provide opportunities for participants to learn from professors and their fellow students that are as rewarding as those provided in traditional graduate seminars? This paper reports the responses of students in two such classes to a series of questions probing these issues, and offers conclusions and recommendations that may help others who plan such courses to structure them more effectively. http://tc.eserver.org/21543.html http://tc.eserver.org/21543.html This article, which appeared in the Dutch journal Tekst[blad], describes four recent studies that are relevant to help developers, and suggests how help developers can use the knowledge gained from those studies to improve the performance support systems they build. http://tc.eserver.org/21502.html http://tc.eserver.org/21502.html This workshop explores how traditionally trained technical communicators can help their companies make wise investments in authoring and delivery software for online documents, explore the potential of technology currently available, and ensure that their technology choices don't lead to dead ends. http://tc.eserver.org/21217.html http://tc.eserver.org/21217.html I'm always puzzled by the misunderstanding, distrust, and sometimes downright animosity between academic and practitioner members of the technical communication family. At its extremes, this attitude manifests itself in practitioners who consider research and theory to be ivory tower games with no relevance to their practice, and in professors who regard practitioners as ignorant anti-intellectuals. The vast majority of us, of course, would never admit to being either academic snobs or practitioner rednecks, but many of us evidence less extreme vestiges of these biases. http://tc.eserver.org/21215.html http://tc.eserver.org/21215.html The editorial advisory board and I have been asking our readers' opinions about the journal's redesign and the directions this publication should take in the future. We've also commissioned usability studies and carefully examined the technologies available for online publication. In this editorial, I'd like to share what we've learned and the directions in which we hope to move during the coming year. http://tc.eserver.org/20152.html http://tc.eserver.org/20152.html This session will help participants understand how to write and submit a manuscript for publication in <i>Technical Communication.</i> It covers the types of articles the journal publishes, its audience, and suggestions for choosing topics, doing research, andpreparing a manuscript. http://tc.eserver.org/14382.html http://tc.eserver.org/14382.html This session will help participants understand how to write and submit a manuscript for publication in <i>Technical Communication.</i> It covers the types of articles the journal publishes, its audience, and suggestions for choosing topics, doing research, and preparing a manuscript. http://tc.eserver.org/14383.html http://tc.eserver.org/14383.html This session will help participants understand the process for reviewing manuscripts submitted to <i>Technical Communication.</i> It covers the types of articles the journal publishes, review procedures and criteria, and approaches to writing constructive evaluations. http://tc.eserver.org/14076.html http://tc.eserver.org/14076.html Distance learning technologies make graduate programs available to technical communicators almost everywhere. Do these programs provide an education that is as rigorous and rewarding as those provided by traditional on-campus programs? http://tc.eserver.org/14074.html http://tc.eserver.org/14074.html Realize that reading online at low resolution reduces reading comprehension significantly. Think in terms of nuggets, not chunks. Be prepared to display text in larger type than you are accustomed to seeing in documents designed to be read on the desktop. Apply bold, italics, and color with caution. Don’t expect to have access to a large variety of fonts. http://tc.eserver.org/14073.html http://tc.eserver.org/14073.html A lot of faculty feel threatened by distance learning because they think that it’s going to displace them. If a University’s view of courses is 'canned courses', then the instructor is no longer needed. In theory, the University can capture a professor’s intellectual property once and offer the course as often as the University wants to without any further compensation to the professor. To me, canned courses are not graduate education anyway. I guess watching a tape lecture is better than nothing at all. Of course, you can read books and get the ideas if that’s all you want, but to me graduate education is more than just reading books. The major experience is the exchange of ideas between instructor and students. I don’t think videotaping or HTML-izing lectures gives you that. http://tc.eserver.org/11780.html http://tc.eserver.org/11780.html In a recent discussion on TECHWR-L, an e-mail discussion list for technical communicators (not affiliated with STC) several posters debated whether STC SIGs are worth the $5 per SIG assessment the Society instituted a few years ago for SIG membership. Some writers noted that they didn’t see any value returned from the SIGs that they belonged to, while others believed that their experience had been quite different. I belong to seven STC SIGs. Admittedly, some provide more value for the dollar than others (at least in terms of tangible benefits such as newsletters and listserve activity), but all of them have been well worth the investment. I’d like to offer a few observations based on my experience as a SIG member as well as four years on the STC’s board of directors and two years on the SIG advisory committee in the early 90s.