Developing Effective Mentorships for Technical Communicators  

Mentorships can contribute significantly to the career success of technical communicators. Effective mentorships are established and maintained by finding the right persons to be mentors through active listening, careful observation, personal analysis, willingness to be influenced, coached and taught, and allowing mentoring relationships to emerge over time. Such mentorships benefit both individual technical communicators by furthering their selfdevelopment and careers, and they benefit their corporations by enhancing morale and productivity.

Shirk, Henrietta Nickels and Howard T. Smith. STC Proceedings (1994). Careers>Mentoring

Robert Pirsig’s Message for Documentation Quality  

Teachers of technical communication frequently recommend that their students read Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) for his views on the complex relationships between technology and human values. As a former technical writer, Pirsig also offers some useful advice about Quality and its relation to the usability of technical documentation. Revisiting Pirsig’s works, including the more recently published Lila (1991), reveals concepts about Quality in documentation that are especially relevant to the usability testing of the documentation for today’s rapidly evolving technologies. This paper examines Pirsig’s views on the some of the characteristics of effective technical communication, and it offers advice to educators and trainers for incorporating Pirsig’s concepts about Quality into their teaching of techniques for the usability testing, and hence quality, of user documentation.

Shirk, Henrietta Nickels and Howard T. Smith. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>Documentation>Quality>Technical Writing