#19715
Too often technical writers fall into the 'tell them everything and tell them all at once' pit. Guided by a well-meaning desire to 'educate' users, what these writers typically do is overwhelm them. Finding the information you need when you need it is a key to success in every business function of every company. Therefore, technical communicators who are able to provide their customers with quick and useful knowledge bring an incredible added value to a beleaguered work force constantly expected to do more and to do it faster.
Edwards, Verlane. STC Central Iowa (2000). Articles>Documentation>Online
#13279
Helping New Writers Through Their First Year 
Are you afraid to hire an entry-level writer? Are you asking yourself questions like: Will an entry-level writer take up too much of my time? Will she be able to work independently? Will she succeed in this organization? Is a new writer worth the risk?
Von Haas, Elaina E. STC Proceedings (2000). Presentations>Management>Mentoring>Writing
#19065
Here Comes That Song Again: The Theory and Practice Blues 
An issue that continues to affect our strategies for developing undergraduate programs is the old contest between theory and practice, or, as it frequently occurs in technical communication programs, between theory and tools. Should we focus our undergraduate programs on understanding principles of communication in the technical world or should we focus on teaching the tools that are called for in the job ads for technical communicators?
Allen, Nancy J. CPTSC Proceedings (2000). Academic>Education>Undergraduate>Theory
#11787
Heuristic Inspections for Documentation – 10 Recommended Documentation Heuristics
We all are familiar with Jakob Nielsen's heuristics for evaluating the usability of interfaces. When I was conducting a study on documentation usability, I started wondering if there existed a similar set of heuristics for evaluating the usability of documentation. The natural place to pose such a question was the STC Usability SIG mailing list. The response was that there was no heuristics set available although someone had tried to open the discussion in the mailing list some time ago. An answer, which led to the list of heuristics presented below, was something along the line 'Well, now that you asked, why don't you put the heuristics together' and so I did.
Purho, Vesa. Usability Interface (2000). Articles>Usability>Documentation
#23494
High-Tech Communication from Finland
Technical communication is still quite a young field in Finland, and only a few people have been in the field for more than a decade. The average age of a Finnish technical communicator is probably around 30, and most of us have four or five years’ experience and an academic background in languages. Estimates of how many technical communicators there are in Finland are hard to come by, but our guesstimate would be anything from 500 to 1000 (and growing). Even though most of us speak Finnish as our native language, English is the main language of technical communication, since most of the products are exported. Localizability is one of the key elements in Finnish technical communication.
Lahti, Maria. TC-FORUM (2000). Articles>TC>Regional>Scandinavia
#20958
If the fonts you’re using aren’t Post-humanist, they’re out of date.
Shinn, Nick. ShinnType (2000). Design>Typography
#14646
Hiring Technical Writers: Are We Looking for the Right Skills?
Winsberg argues that the most valuable employees are those with a work ethic and analytical, organizational, and writing skills, rather than those with specific software experience.
Winsberg, Freya Y. Intercom (2000). Careers>Management
#29035
His Master's Voice: Tiro and the Rise of the Roman Secretarial Class 
The foundation for Rome's imperial bureaucracy was laid during the first century B.C., when functional and administrative writing played an increasingly dominant role in the Late Republic. During the First and Second Triumvirates, Roman society, once primarily oral, relied more and more on documentation to get its official business done. By the reign of Augustus, the orator had ceded power to the secretary, usually a slave trained as a scribe or librarian. This cultural and political transformation can be traced in the career of Marcus Tullius Tiro (94 B.C. to 4 A.D.), Cicero's confidant and amanuensis. A freedman credited with the invention of Latin shorthand (the <em>notae Tironianae</em>), Tiro transcribed and edited Cicero's speeches, composed, collected, and eventually published his voluminous correspondence, and organized and managed his archives and library. As his former master s fortune sank with the dying Republic, Tiro s began to rise. After Cicero's assassination, he became the orator's literary executor and biographer. His talents were always in demand under the new bureaucratic regime, and he prospered by producing popular grammars and secretarial manuals. He died a wealthy centenarian and a full Roman citizen.
Di Renzo, Anthony. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2000). Articles>TC>Government>History
#12963
The idea behind Open Source is simple: everyone should have the freedom to copy, distribute, and change source code. The implications, however, overturn the conventional high-tech business model. When software is no longer intellectual property, everything changes. Development is quicker because more people are involved. Bugs are caught more quickly. Instead of being passive consumers, customers can become partners in development. Instead of selling software, companies sell hardware, services, or added value. Internally, companies become more interactive and more loosely structured. If Open Source continues to gather speed, high-tech workers will discover that it is not just a development model, but also a new model for corporate life. For writers, the approach of Open Source could be especially important. How documentation is viewed and used, how writers interact with developers, and what tools are used--all of these and more could be affected by the Open Source movement.
Byfield, Bruce. TECHWR-L (2000). Articles>Software>Open Source
#14051
Hot Politics: The Changing Places of Political Participation in the Age of the Internet 
Among the many complexities of power, economics, interests, personality, passions, social interaction, ideology, culture, and religion that keep politics both more and less than rational deliberation are those that arise from the dynamics of literate interchange, the historical formation of forums, and the generic shaping of utterances within those forums. Recent research on genre and discursive systems, along with situated cognition and action, suggests that the character of the local activity space is extremely important for what happens, what people think and learn, and what social consequences emerge. While the shape of politics to emerge in the cyber world is still somewhat obscure, by considering the forums of political interchange that are emerging on the internet, how they draw on previous forums and genres of political interchange, and the pressures that seem to be encouraging the heightening of certain elements within those genres, we may gain a first reading of some choices in front of us.
Bazerman, Charles. UCSB (2000). Articles>Collaboration>Online>Politics
#13278
How Did the Special Needs Committee Get Started?
A member of STC’s Special Needs Committee describes the history and goals of the Committee.
Hanigan, Mark. STC Proceedings (2000). Presentations>TC>History
#14868
In order to understand diagrammatic reasoning with multiple diagrams, this study proposes a theoretical framework that focuses on the cognitive processes of perceptual and conceptual integration. The perceptual integration process involves establishing interdependence between relevant system elements that have been dispersed across multiple diagrams, while the conceptual integration process involves generating and refining hypotheses about a system by combining higher-level information inferred from the diagrams. This study applies a diagrammaticreasoning framework of a single diagram to assess the usability of multiple diagrams as an integral part of a system development methodology. Our experiment evaluated the effectiveness and usability of design guidelines to aid problem solving with multiple diagrams. The results of our experiment revealed that understanding a system represented by multiple diagrams involves a process of searching for related information and of developing hypotheses about the target system. The results also showed that these perceptual and conceptual integration processes were facilitated by incorporating visual cues and contextual information in the multiple diagrams as representation aids. Visual cues indicate which elements in a diagram are related to elements in other diagrams; the contextual information indicates how the individual datum in one diagram is related to the overall hypothesis about the entire system.
Kim, Jinwoo, Jungpil Hahn and Hyoungmee Hahn. Yonsei University (2000). Design>Graphic Design
#25806
How Do You Make the Student-to-Professional Transition?
A summary of the 1998 panels, 'Transitioning from Student to Professional: What's in Your Future?' and 'To Ph.D. or Not to Ph.D? That Is the Question'.
Trich Kremer, Jennifer D. HFES (2000). Careers>Human Computer Interaction
#19075
How Does the Institutional Home of a Program Affect its Development?
Having the department of technical communication located within the School of Engineering has a significant impact on the program’s development.
Davis, Marjorie T. CPTSC Proceedings (2000). Academic>Education>Engineering
#13343
How Important is Visual Feedback When Using a Touch Screen?
From check station point-of-sale devices (restaurants, grocery stores, etc.) to information kiosks, to the cars we drive (navigation systems), touch screens have become the input device of choice. While the versatility of the touch screen is highly desired, the poor performance it achieves relative to the mechanical keyboard has been something that users have been forced to deal with. Empirical research studies have found that touch screens consistently produced slower and less accurate performance when compared with keyboards (Barrett & Krueger, 1994; Wilson, Inderrieden, & Liu, 1995). Schneiderman (1998) outlines the many advantages and disadvantages to using a touch screen.
Deron, Michael. Usability News (2000). Articles>Usability>Design
#10142
Bradley Dilger writes that making computers 'easy' may also make them less useful. 'Ease is never free: its gain is matched by a loss in choice, security, privacy, health, or a combination thereof,' he says. He urges professors to understand the inimical effects of ease and explore pedagogical practices that can counter those effects.
Dilger, Bradley. Journal of Electronic Publishing (2000). Design>Usability>Technology
#14831
How Papers Can Find and Retain Copy Editors
The American Copy Editors Society wondered what papers were doing to address this problem, whether editors felt that the academic community should do more to feed the pipeline, and what the industry was doing to encourage people to enter the field. The study was administered by copy editor Carrie Camillo of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. With the support of her paper and its editor, Tim McGuire, she produced a 33-page report that is the most comprehensive work available on the subject. This column is taken from Camillo’s report.
Glamann, Hank. ACES (2000). Careers>Editing>Journalism
#21432
In the late 1970s, a great flood of creative talent, drawn from the ranks of people who had never before touched a computer, took to the keyboards of the early microcomputers and started a revolution. The early programming environments and languages were simple, natural, and accessible. Within five years, that group had been disenfranchised by the advent of 'serious' computing environments, such as Pascal and C, and software settled back down to being the business of professionals. With the advent of the web, another even greater flood of talent was unleashed, but this time the end came sooner. Within two years, the originally simple HTML environment had become clouded with hacks on top of hacks, as the C++ boys moved in and took over. The new talent could only continue to produce pretty pictures, while the traditional priesthood again took up the real work of programming. The web has stagnated ever since.
Tognazzini, Bruce. Nielsen Norman Group (2000). Design>Web Design>History
#10139
Bo-Christer Björk and Ziga Turk, editor and one of the co-editors of the Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction, surveyed scientists and discovered that they increasingly look to e-journals for information.
Bjork, Bo-Christer and Ziga Turk. Journal of Electronic Publishing (2000). Articles>Publishing>Online
#11776
How Technical Communicators Can Apply User-Centered Design to Their Work
The user-centered design process applies to designing a piece of technical communication as well as designing a product. Placing the user at the center of the design and development process for information ensures that a usable piece of communication will be delivered to the customer. Technical communicators can apply each of the user-centered design (UCD) tasks to their own writing process and information development cycle.
Fisher, Lori H. Usability Interface (2000). Design>User Centered Design>TC
#19851
How the East Tennessee Chapter of STC Created, and Administers, Its J. Paul Blakely Scholarship
Every local chapter of any professional society should consider starting up a scholarship. Scholarships are obviously great for students, but they’re also great for the people who give them out. You get wonderful PR, a lifeline of new blood, and that inner glow that comes from doing good.
Hirst, Russel. STC Proceedings (2000). Academic>Scholarships>TC
#31662
How to Avoid Proofreading Blunders
The following tips are to help you avoid embarassing--and costly--bloppers and blunders.
Druley, Steve. Copresco (2000). Articles>Editing
#10223
How to Deliver Winning Presentations: Connecting Through Body Talk
The real secret to powerful delivery is a strong, positive, uninterrupted connection with the audience. To build that connection, you first of all need the right attitude. This is a combination of appreciation and respect for your listeners and enthusiasm about getting your message across to them. Now let's look at ways to express that attitude with your body and face.
Reimold, Cheryl. IEEE PCS (2000). Presentations>Advice
#10221
How to Deliver Winning Presentations: The Magic of Connection
Do you wish you were a powerful, persuasive presenter? Do you envy people who can address a large audience with casual ease and charm, as though conversing with a few good friends? In this series, I will show you how to turn wish into reality and become one of that select group of exceptional presenters. It's surprisingly simple, as you'll see - and you don't need any special 'natural talent.'
Reimold, Cheryl. IEEE PCS (2000). Presentations>Advice
#10222
How to Deliver Winning Presentations: The Winning Attitude
As we saw last time, the master key that opens the door to powerful delivery is honest connection with your audience. Outstanding speakers know that they must at every moment be connected with the real people in the audience, for a real purpose that matters to those people, and without hiding behind any slick stage personality. This is what generates the trust essential for persuasion. You may object that in most of your presentations, you're only selling technical information, with persuasion rooted entirely in objective criteria. But our experience with many organizations strongly suggests that this is the wrong view. You're always selling a package: people want the facts, but they also want to know that you are trustworthy and committed to helping them or to seeing a project through. And they get this essential information about trustworthiness and commitment not from the numbers and charts you present but from the way you connect with your listeners.
Reimold, Cheryl. IEEE PCS (2000). Presentations>Advice