View from the Other Side:
The Calm Before the Storm

by Nancy Halverson, Feature Writer

I now know what calm is — I was forced to experience calm throughout January as I suffered through and recovered from mycoplasma pneumonia (not a bacteria, not a virus — just a pain!) First hand experience of the NHS (National Health System) hospitals gives me the ability to report that socialized medicine does actually work well. (Although the cleaners in the infectious disease ward don't work particularly well.)

You want me to plan a conference for when?!

After that calming experience (and the subsequent two months of forced almost-relaxation to recover lung function), it's been a bit of a shock to get back into a full-on return to my normal whirlwind of a life. And the whirlwind only ever seems to increase. I've somehow managed to take on a lead role in organizing a Regional STC conference. Wait for it... scheduled for this October! Okay, it's not that big a deal... except these things normally take a year to two to get organized. We’re condensing it because we were offered the opportunity to host an STC Board of Directors meeting in London in October (12-13) and it would make a very good platform for an accompanying conference (Oct 13-14, 2006).

Although the preliminary discussions happened while I was in the throes of pneumonia (i.e., without me), now I'm heavily involved. One of the main reasons for picking up the organizational reins was that I'll be president of the UK chapter when the event takes place, and I see it as part of my responsibility to make the conference as good as I can help to make it. Even though it's costing time with my family (which now includes a French exchange student - more on that later), and I have to practically hide my STC activity from my boss, I'm quite convinced that it's worth the effort.

We're aiming to get some interest from businesses which currently don't highly value technical communications. One of the major problems (in the UK at least) is that businesses don't see the need for skilled technical communications. Anyone can write, so if you can write, you can do the documentation—right? We know that's not true, and so we want to bring together some business types with our technical communicators to broaden the scope of our professional development. Thus, the title of our conference: Making Cents of Making Sense: Technical Communication and Business. We are pursuing speakers who can help to show how our profession improves business's bottom line—and to show technical communicators how to bring profits to the businesses who use us.

So, here's my invitation to any of you who wants to see London this fall: Come. Experience a bit of England, meet European and Middle Eastern members of the STC, and help us to discover why the business community needs us. Visit http://www.stcuk.org/R2conf/ for more details (as they become available).

Speaking of conferences, I'll be at the STC conference in Las Vegas this May if anyone is attending. Let me know and we'll get together!

Adventures in French…and English

About the exchange student: In mid-February, we picked up our eldest daughter (Maddie) from her French "family". She'd spent five months living with a family near Nantes, attending French school, living life in total French immersion. Although it was tough on her 11-year-old emotions, she weathered it and is now fluent and bilingual. Now, we're in the second phase of the exchange, hosting the 12-year-old girl whose family had to put up with our kid. Lauranne hasn't had any of the homesickness problems that our daughter suffered, which has made things very easy on us so far. She arrived with no English, and we allowed French for the first week to settle her in. But since then, we tell her everything in English (or charades) and she's progressing nicely. It's tough having another child around: the food, the activities, and the laundry all become more complicated. Having to teach her the language at the same time adds more to the burden, but we're so pleased with Maddie's accomplishments that it makes this burden a pleasure.

My greatest fear with Lauranne is that she'll have such a huge variation of accents to mash together that she'll never quite be able to pick one and stick with it. She gets the broad Sheffield accent from our friends and from school, with a softer English accent from other friends and our girls, and the Canadian accents from our house, along with Bart Simpson from the ever-present PlayStation® and DVDs. While the French family spent time with Maddie on proper and predictable pronunciation of words, the joy of English is the extraordinary lack of standards. Rules are less predictable than the exceptions. It really is a bizarre language.

This type of language exchange is far from the typical here in the UK. We're among a very small minority of families who opt for the long-term exchange. It's so uncommon that we're actually the first in our school to do anything like this—and the local social services agencies are creating new policy based on us. There are only about 15 families in England who do these exchanges in a year—some with French families, some with German families. But since we couldn't get bilingual education for our kids any other way, this seemed like a good idea. We're planning to get our second daughter (Hilary) into an exchange as well, hopefully this fall.

Work, work, work

My work at ZOOtech continues apace, with uphill battles all over the place to get a single source system in place to make the work of a lone-writer a little simpler. But with the business continuing to evolve, the requirements for my production change as well. Process review and revision seems constant, and sometimes I feel like I'm only doing planning to say that I've done it, since the plans often are never really fulfilled as the projects change scope and direction. C'est la vie.

And finally, the Weather

It's grey and raining/snowing today; we haven't had much warmth this spring at all. We're all hoping for the weather to warm up soon. As the blooms come up, we'd really like to get out and enjoy the outdoors with our family.

Have a great spring in southwestern Ontario!

About Nancy Halverson

Nancy grew up in Toronto, but has lived in Ottawa, Melbourne, Waterloo, and now Sheffield. She has travelled through the South Pacific, Australia and Indonesia, which is where she met her husband, Ryan Wilson (another Canadian), along the way.

A career switch introduced her to the STC in 1997. Her writing experience has included several contract positions and a position at Inscriber for several years. She has two daughters and has been living in England for over two years.