Letters to the Editor and Recognition

by Debbie Kerr, The Quill Editor

If no news is good news, then letters from readers are great news. When you are part of a team who have made changes to last year's newsletter, you are cautiously optimistic that others will like what you did. It is therefore rewarding when you actually get the feedback that indicates you are on the right track.

Pictures

The following is an e-mail that proves you do not have to be long-winded to get your message across.

I love the pictures!

Regards, Andrea Steinhauser Technical Writer NDI

Seminar Summaries

The second e-mail was great from two perspectives: it was feedback, and it resulted in an offer to write an article about the new terminal at Pearson International Airport. Here is part of the original e-mail.

Debbie:

Scott Russell

A Team Approach

I remember the first time that I told someone that I was the editor of the newsletter and that someone else had helped me to come up with the cascading stylesheets and templates. I think it was a bit like 'lunch bag let down' to the person who thought that I did it all. I like to think that a team approach works well because:

• we share ideas that one person would not necessarily come up with on their own;
• each of us has our own strengths, which allows us to complement each other. If I created the stylesheet on my own, it would have an impact alright, but probably not the one that I wanted it to have.

So, for those of you who liked September's issue, I wanted to ensure that those who did a lot of the work got some well-deserved recognition.

A Modified Format

Prior to creating the first issue of the year's newsletter, Opal Gamble and I discussed what we would like to do with this year's newsletter and Opal made our thoughts a reality by tweaking the cascading stylesheet. 

The Line Art

Opal also mentioned that Martin Eisenloeffel could do some neat stuff with pictures to create the line art that you saw in the September issue of The Quill. There were a lot of pictures to take and turn into these miniature pieces of art. Thank you to Martin Eisenloeffel, who had an exceptionally large amount to do for the first issue of this newsletter and Opal Gamble for the idea and some line art creation of her own.

The Articles

My hat goes off to those of you who submitted articles, especially for the first issue, when some of us were struggling to get back into the mode of writing for the newsletter. Getting back in the mode was also something that Margie Yundt had to do so that she could continue to turn those great articles into works of art.

About Debbie Kerr

In the 20 years that Debbie has been writing documentation, she has worked in a variety of industries: government, retail, software, and insurance. She is currently employed at The Economical Insurance Group in Kitchener writing design specifications.

Debbie has been a member of the STC since 1994 and has held several council positions over the last three years.