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In this Issue: |
Welcome: The December STC Newsletter New Column: The Wandering Eye - XML Resources on the Internet From the President's Desk: Generosity and Thankfulness for the Holidays Report: November Meeting: Veredus - A Single Sourcing Tool Career Corner: Interviewing - Part III Special Feature: The Gender Gap in Technical Writing (Revised - See Editor's Note!) |
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STC Events: |
December General Meeting: Empowering Your Professional Self Presented by Patrick McCormack Patrick will conduct a hands-on workshop consisting of networking + business etiquette + motivation. His theme is "Empowering your Professional Self: Does a Professional's Network Equal a Professional's Net Worth?" Tuesday December 9, 2003 at 7:00 - 9:00 p.m. Want to Attend the Next Annual STC Conference? It's important for your career to keep up with developments in the profession. Our next annual conference is May 9 - 12 in Baltimore, Maryland. (conference details here) The STC Toronto Chapter is considering how to help members to attend and we want to know if you are interested. We could charter a bus for the nine-hour drive (plus lunch and border crossings). We could get a discount hotel near the conference site. The bus would cost under C$100 and the hotel about C$120 a night. If we charged only the cost, would you attend this conference? Please send your responses to baltimore@stctoronto.org |
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Welcome: |
Welcome to the December STC Newsletter By Editor Philip Kahn - newsletter@stctoronto.org A big thank you to everyone who sent us comments about our first HTML issue in November. Creating a newsletter for other writers is a somewhat daunting task and so we were thrilled with the mostly positive feedback. We also received some excellent suggestions, some of which we have been able to incorporate into this issue. Keith Soltys joins the writing team this month and has contributed an excellent guide to XML resources as well as a report on last month's meeting. We are also reprinting Hilary Edwards article on the gender gap in our profession; due to a communications error we mistakenly printed an earlier revision last month. Andrew Brooke has written another very useful Career Column and our chapter President Robert Milkovich presents a timely seasonal message. As always you can send your comments to newsletter@stctoronto.org. Our privacy policy and subscription options are at the bottom of the page. |
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The Wandering Eye #1: |
XML Resources on the Net Keith Soltys - keith@soltys.ca (Ed. Note: This is Keith's first 'Wandering Eye' column. Each month he will highlight some resources on the web which will be of interest to technical communicators.) XML is a relatively new technology, but it seems to be cropping up everywhere. It's sure to affect the work of most technical writers, whether they have to document a tool or system that uses XML to exchange data, or they have to learn how to use an XML-based authoring tool or content-management system. Here are some resources that can help you learn more about XML. The SGML-XML Cover Pages on oasis-open.org are one of the largest XML sites on the Web. To give you an idea of how large, the site map is 36 pages long when printed! The site is well organized, with a good mix of news, articles, and reference material, and with links to all of the core specifications. You can even get updates through an RSS news channel. The World Wide Web Consortium is one of the main drivers of new web technologies, including XML. Their XML Page contains the core recommendations and specifications as well as links to groups that are working on more advanced and unfinished technologies, such as XML Query. O'Reilly is one of the best computer book publishers, and they own the XML.com domain, which is another large repository of everything XML. As you'd expect from a publisher, this is a content-heavy site, with lots of articles, book excerpts, and columns from experts in the field, all neatly organized. The Resources directory is a gold mine of information. The XML Tutorial on w3schools.com is a good place to start learning XML. The tutorial covers both beginning and advanced topics, and there are lots of examples. You can take a quiz at the end to test your knowledge. Once you've taken the XML tutorial, you can continue on with tutorials on XML-related topics like DTDs, XSL, and SOAP. Better yet, all of these tutorials are free. The Starlabel.nl XML Page is another large XML metapage. I like this one because it is well organized and really is one large page, which means you can skim through it quickly if you're in a hurry. Although there are many commercially available tools, much of the development takes place in academia and the open source movement. Free XML Tools and Software is a metapage with links to just about every free XML tool available. If you want to learn XML you'll need tools like an editor, a parser, and a validator, and you'll find them all here. Finally, if you're going to be writing documentation in XML, you'll probably be using a schema. DocBook is the most commonly used schema for documentation, and the docbook.org site has a complete reference to it. Users of Word 2003 can now save their documents in XML and Microsoft has documented the WordML schema. Keith Soltys has been working as a technical writer for 16 years, and is currently at the Toronto Stock Exchange. He maintains the Internet Resources for Technical Communicators web site and has recently started a weblog. He lives in Pickering with his wife, two children, a cat, and an ever growing collection of Grateful Dead CDs. |
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From the President's Desk: |
Generosity and Thankfulness for the Holidays STC Toronto President Robert Milkovich - robert.milkovich@sympatico.ca Well it's that time of year again - the Holidays are upon us! Shopping and lineups, gift giving and parties. Religious observations, music, decorations, and hopefully even some time off work. However you spend it, it's an opportunity to think back on the year and to realize how fortunate we are, despite the problems we've faced in 2003. This was a difficult year for many - SARS, a war, forest fires, a hurricane, a blackout, and more. They've all taken a toll on friends, family, and ourselves. But despite these difficulties, I want to encourage everyone to look on the bright side. As I think on the Holidays I realize that the spirit of giving and helping is still very much alive in our chapter. It's precisely this spirit that gives us the strength to overcome any obstacle and to make things even better than they were before. It's difficult to carry on when faced with obstacles like we've seen this year, but the dedicated volunteers of our chapter have shown that they care about helping others no matter what else is going on. Without our volunteers, we would not exist as a chapter. And that means that there would be none of the things that make this chapter special within the STC. STC Toronto is one of the largest chapters in our organization, and one of the most active. We have at least two meetings per month for ten months of the year. We put on two professional development events per year. We help people network and get referrals to new job opportunities. And our job bank is one of the best and busiest in all of STC. In our chapter, we have much for which to be thankful. I know these volunteers personally, and I have seen the kind of service they give to their friends, families and communities. They donate money to worthy causes. They are involved in charities and schools. They help people who are less fortunate than themselves. They are really super people who find time to make the world a better place. This Holiday season, let's give thanks to those who give their time and talents to making our chapter one of the best in the STC! From the STC Toronto Executive Committee, we wish you and yours the best of the Holiday season, and a very Happy New Year. |
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Meeting Report: |
November: Rob Frankland on Single Sourcing Tools Keith Soltys - keith@soltys.ca
The November presentation at the Toronto STC meeting was a demo of Rascal Software’s Veredus, given by CEO and president Rob Frankland. Veredus may represent the future of single-sourcing and help-authoring tools. This is an XML/XSL-based tool that hides the complexity of XML authoring behind a slick, highly-graphical, and reasonably intuitive interface. It’s aimed at small documentation groups, say 1-10 writers, and has multi-user features that should be suitable for groups of that size. Veredus has some features that will make FrameMaker users weep with envy. Indexes are built and displayed on the fly. Conditional indicators offer an unlimited palette of colours and shades, and you can build complex conditionals with Boolean operators. Graphic placement is drag and drop, as is resizing. Veredus comes with templates for building most major help formats. It can also output to PDF, but formatting control is quite limited in the current release. Unfortunately, this will restrict its usefulness as a single-sourcing tool, at least until the next release (due early next year) comes out. Customization of formats is possible through the interface, but you can’t modify the underlying schemas or XSL transforms. Rascal Software plans to offer a separate tool to allow this sometime in the future, and are also considering tools that will be more suited for larger enterprises. Since all files are saved in XML, you could edit or post-process them in other tools, but it would be a one-way process. You can import RTF, MIF, HTML, text, and images. I can’t offer any comments on bugs or stability based on the brief demo I saw. You can download an evaluation copy from Rascals web site if you want to try it out for yourself. Anyone who is considering help authoring in RoboHelp or WebWorks Publisher, and doesn’t have a requirement for complete control of printed output, should take a good hard look at Veredus. It’s an impressive product. As for myself, I’ll wait until the next release, but I will look at it. This is one of the most interesting tools I’ve seen in some time and could very well be a major contender if future releases add some of the functionality mentioned at last night’s demo. I said, in a discussion on the Framers mailing list last week, that I don’t really expect to be using FrameMaker in five years. After seeing the demo, I wouldn’t be surprised if I was using Veredus. Cost is $899 US and there’s a competitive upgrade available for $699. And just in case you were wondering, Rascal is a horse. Update: Veredus is Latin for 'swift courier horse' (Editor's Note: I spoke to Rob Frankland after the meeting and was pleased to hear that Veredus is Java based and that they already have an early version running on the Mac OS X platform. This would fill a real gap for Mac based writers (like me!) so I passed the information onto the venerable and popular Mac news site Macintouch... who reprinted my letter and credited our chapter.) Keith Soltys has been working as a technical writer for 16 years, and is currently at the Toronto Stock Exchange. He maintains the Internet Resources for Technical Communicators web site and has recently started a weblog. He lives in Pickering with his wife, two children, a cat, and an ever growing collection of Grateful Dead CDs. |
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Career Corner: |
This month, we'll examine the best strategies for answering interview questions. To introduce this topic, it can be quite educational (and very amusing) to look at some wrong approaches. Here are various actual reasons interviewers have heard when asking applicants why they wanted the job:
Aside from being hilarious, these answers have one thing in common: they all reflect the fact that the applicant is only thinking about their needs and what they want the company to do for them. Although most people are intelligent enough not to give answers like these, these anecdotes reflect a common problem people have during interviews: they are so focused on themselves they forget or ignore the fact that they should be equally focused on the companyís needs. However, it can also be a problem if you focus too much on what the company wants and not enough on your needs. A successful interview, therefore, is one in which both parties:
Interviewing is very similar to dating. In both activities, you and the other party are trying to learn as much about each other as possible in a relatively short amount of time, and often under pressure, with the goal of a potential long-term relationship. Neither side wants to appear too anxious or too aloof, and this can be a very difficult balance to maintain. The attitude you want to subtly reflect during an interview (if the job interests you) is that you would like this job, but that you donít need it. Recognize that behind every question an interviewer asks, there is fear. Fear that you will not fit in. Fear that you are lying or overstating your accomplishments. Fear that you will not get along with the interviewer or with the other workers. In other words, fear that you are not the right person for the job. The interviewer is often just as scared as you are; scared that they will select the wrong person and cost the company time and money. Your task, therefore, is not only to destroy this fear by showing that you are a professional who is genuinely interested in the job, but to replace it with another fear: the fear of what will happen if they do not hire you. That is why you must solidly know your accomplishments and be able to list them strongly and succinctly. For example, by showing how you have improved processes and contributed to the quality of a product, you are planting a seed of fear that if the interviewer does not select you, their company's products and documentation will continue to contain hidden problems and will not be as effective as they could be. Presenting 'before and after' samples from your portfolio that graphically illustrate how you improved the documentation or the product itself can be tremendously effective. Over the next few issues, we will begin reviewing various questions that you may be asked. However, all interview questions are really different variations of the same, basic question: Why should I hire you? You may not be asked this question directly, but you still must know the answer to it. You have to be able to explicitly state your strengths and what distinguishes you from all the other applicants in order to win the job.Andrew Brooke is the STC Toronto Job Bank Manager and Membership Manager, and is a full-time technical writer at InSystems in Markham. |
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Meeting Report: |
(Editor's Note: Last month's newsletter mistakenly included an early draft of this article. We apologize for this mistake and include the final revision here.) An interesting pattern is emerging among those who work in technical communications. Women are entering the profession in greater numbers than ever before. Indeed the STC office in Virginia, USA reports that of nearly 20,000 active STC members, the female percentage is 64 to 36% for males, indicating that the majority of their members are women.
The following statistics were compiled from recent STC Technical Communicator Salary Surveys. In 1997 and again in 1998, 2,000 to 2,300 questionnaires were mailed out with response rates of 45% and 46% respectively. Between 3,200 and 3,600 questionnaires were mailed out from 1999 through 2003 with a response rate of between 25% and 44%. As random samples of STC members whose primary specialties are technical writing or editing, they are representative of the total number of females and males from Canada and the U.S who responded.
A large disparity exists between current membership and 2003 figures above. Please note that the table refers to specific subsets of technical communication, whereas the total STC membership figures may include graphic designers, technical illustrators, photographers and audiovisual specialists, Web and intranet page designers, information architects and developers, multimedia artists, translators and unemployed students as well as technical writers and editors. I acknowledge, also, the possibility of other variables or gender biases (for example, perhaps females make more of an effort to respond to salary surveys than males) and the margins of error that are inherent in every statistical survey. As a result, the ratio of survey responses (female to male) may not perfectly reflect the gender mix among members who work primarily as technical writers or editors. However, there is solid evidence that women are assuming a growing share of the total jobs in the technical profession, and that this increase is likely progressive. This interesting trend is further observed in the Certificate in Professional and Technical Writing classes at Glendon College, York University. Twenty eight females and 7 males are currently registered in first year classes (a 4:1 ratio), and my second year class, which will graduate in spring of 2004, consists of 23 females and 11 males, (a 2:1 ratio). Many of us will take up entry-level positions in the Technical Communications industry, further consolidating the statistics. This year twenty-eight females and 12 males are registered for first year introductory translation courses at Glendon College (a 7:3 ratio). Many members of this class of 2007 will enter the work force as translators and technical conmmunicators, continuing to maintain an upward curve in gender trends. And yet, in 1959, when the Toronto Chapter of STW (Society of Technical Writers) was formed, it consisted, primarily, of male engineers who wrote instructions and descriptions of how electrical and mechanical products worked. (Twelve years later the STW assumed the name STC.) The pervasiveness of computer technology and the emergence of the Internet and on-line communication created a desire for personnel to support all aspects of the rapidly evolving world of technology. And one of those aspects was making technical information available to those who needed it. This created a demand for technical communicators at all levels. The STC 1995 salary survey reported that in the last ten years the "Gender Gap" in median salaries in the technical communication profession has decreased from 19% to 4.5%. This may account for the fact that until the 1990’s not as many women were in the profession. The survey also reported a “larger number of women in the lower-paying, entry level range.” It appears evident from those numbers and more recent statistics that a high proportion of newcomers to the profession in the last 18 years have been women. What is it that attracts them to a career in technical communication? What is it that attracts women to a career in technical communication? Debbie Davy, a senior technical communicator, feels that technical communicator positions offer greater flexibility than traditional office positions. Achieving a work-life balance may be easier for women in technical communication because they are not limited by a physical office environment to earn income. This opinion is endorsed by Claudette Labriola, a technical writing student at Glendon College, who says that flexibility is definitely one of the attractions that have drawn her to technical writing as a career. The STC’s 2001 Independent Contractor/Temp Agency Employee Salary Survey supports this view of flexibility. Studying the responses of 153 females and 96 males in the U.S. and Canada, who call themselves independent contractors, they found that the number one reason for being an independent contractor was flexibility in work schedule. Ninety-eight percent said that given the choice they would prefer to be an independent contractor than a full-time salaried employee. Interestingly, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and technical communication professionals, IEEE, has more male members. However, the emphasis of their work appears to be on preparing information for a technologically sophisticated audience i.e. people dealing with information architecture and development, as opposed to the STC, whose primary specialties are in the area of writing and editing technical documents for a more general audience. The 64% female to 36% male ratio of the 19,912 STC members does not necessarily reflect the “real world” female to male ratio of technical communicators holding down jobs in that field, any more than there are female members (like myself) who are STC members and unemployed. Likewise, there may be male technical communicators employed in the field, who have chosen not to join the STC. These numbers are intended to be informative rather than scientific. As for future trends - women will continue to enter the technical communications field at all levels, maintaining a visible and viable presence. And I predict that, in the areas of technical writing and editing, the strength in the number of female professionals has yet to reach its peak. Hilary Edwards, a new STC Chapter member, enjoys number crunching. A former programmer/analyst with a recent B.A. in psychology, she is currently looking for work as a technical writer. |
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About the STC: |
The Society for Technical Communication is an individual membership organization dedicated to advancing the arts and sciences of technical communication. It is the largest organization of its type in the world. Its 25,000 members include technical writers and editors, content developers, documentation specialists, technical illustrators, instructional designers, academics, information architects, usability and human factors professionals, visual designers, Web designers and developers, and translators - anyone whose work makes technical information available to those who need it. The STC Toronto Chapter was founded in 1959 (then the Society of Technical Writers) and is the largest chapter in Canada. |
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About this Newsletter: |
This newsletter is produced monthly by the STC Toronto Chapter and is sent to all registered members just before the General Meeting. We will not share nor sell our address list and will only send e-mails with information we believe to be useful and relevant to our members. If you do not wish to receive this newsletter, please unsubscribe by clicking here and sending us the resulting e-mail. If you are a member but wish to subscribe at a different address, or you are not a member of the Toronto chapter but would like to receive this newsletter, please click here and e-mail us the address at which you wish to receive the newsletter. |
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