Education Seminar a Success!

by Kim Creed, Education Manager

On February 16 and 17, our chapter hosted the annual Education Seminar at the Hilton Garden Inn in Cambridge. Despite hazardous weather and school board closures, 25 people participated in the two-day Education Seminar. Guest speakers Jim Taylor of Coquitlam, B.C. and Jane L. Smith of Sedona, Arizona, shared practical tools and tips on how to effectively edit documents and design instructional materials, respectively.

Thursday, Taylor, an experienced columnist and editor, led the group through the Eight Steps to Editing course which he co-developed and has been teaching for over 20 years. The seminar content focused on how to employ his methodology, making a document more coherent, consistent, and interesting for readers. The editing methodology did not elaborate on the mechanics of formatting (which all technical communicators need to consider) but did provide participants with tools to employ to energize writing and organize content.

Kim gets some tips on name-calling.

Additionally, Taylor enlightened participants about the power of threes. Writing three examples or using three adjectives to describe something appeals more to readers' ears and eyes than using two or four. Taylor demonstrated the power of three using Shakespearen insults, where calling someone a half-faced foot-licker, lacked the power of calling someone a beslubbering, half-faced, foot-licker.

Smith organized her instructional design presentation around group work, asking participants to work through exercises based on her lecture and slides. Smith's approach to designing instructional materials requires more upfront planning than sweating over what to write. The planning phase involves asking customers about what their pain is, defining customer job roles, and even asking the question of whether training is really necessary. According to Smith, whose husband owns and runs two restaurants in Arizona, maybe the reason waiters aren't using trays to carry drinks isn't due to lack of training, but due to warped trays that lead to spills. To paraphrase Smith, "We could train waiters all day, but that wouldn't solve the defective tray problem."

As organizer, I collected positive feedback about the Education seminar from all of the participants .

On behalf of the STC Southwestern Ontario, thanks to all participants for braving the storm and making the 2006 seminar a success.

About Kim Creed (Education Manager)

Kim works as an Information Developer at PEER Group. Previously, she has written documentation for optical carriers, business process automation software, and manufacturing assembly lines. In her downtime, Kim practices yoga (Sivananda tradition), sketches, creates culinary delights, reads a lot of non-fiction, and is patiently trying to teach her bird to say a few words.