By Jackie Damrau | Fellow
The STC International Summit Awards (formerly the STC Competitions) sets the standard for quality technical communications. People enter the STC competition not only with the hope of winning an award, but also to receive a thorough critique and constructive feedback from a body of their peers.
The local STC chapters and communities typically host local and regional competitions in September, October, November, and December. Entries that win a Distinguished or Excellence award are eligible for entry in the STC International Summit Awards Competition. In 2011, STC reorganized the competition into four categories: Informational Materials, Instructional Materials, Promotional Materials, and User Support Materials.
Julian Hofberg accepts the Best of Show award from STC Immediate Past President Cynthia Currie-Clifford (left) and President Hillary Hart (right) on behalf of his team for SAMHSA Permanent Supportive Housing Toolkit
We had a great competition this year. We received 117 entries, and made awards to 13 Distinguished, 36 Excellence, and 29 Merit entries. From those entries, there were two Best of Show awards:
SAMHSA Permanent Supportive Housing Toolkit is a reference document in the User Support Materials category, which Chandria Jones, Carol Fisher, and Carol Bianco submitted to the Washington, DC Chapter. The Best of Show (BoS) team wrote, “Beautifully written, with language, style, and tone entirely appropriate for the intended audience, both within each booklet, and across the eight-booklet set. Its stunning design and layout highly promotes usability and readability and appropriately emphasizes important information in an interesting and extremely appealing fashion with an exceptional use of color as a design element. Materials targeted to each audience do a great job of addressing audience needs and presenting accurate, thorough, and complete information, with references where appropriate.”
Arthur Pease, winner of Best of Show award for Pictures of the Future
Pictures of the Future is a technical report in the Information Materials category, which Arthur Pease of Siemens Corporation, Germany, submitted to the Washington, DC Chapter. The BoS judges wrote, “While its subject matter is technical in nature, its editorial policy appears to be to inform specialists in one R&D area of the interesting and innovative activities going on in another so perhaps, new ideas might be generated, new synergies developed. Pictures of the Future shows the editorial staff’s remarkable communications planning and knowledge of the publication’s audience. The design and copy are carefully integrated, but the story always leads the way and determines the organization and presentation. The stories have global and local relevance. There is no cookie-cutter template approach to design here; there is no orientation to ‘using every picture we’ve got,’ and—at least, based on our observations—no orientation toward puffery and pushing Siemens products more than they should be.”
All entries were judged on five factors: purpose, information design, usability, media, writing, and overall impression. The three award levels are Distinguished, Excellence, and Merit. The following describes the criteria for each award level:
Distinguished: Clearly superior in all areas. The entry contains no major flaws and few, if any, minor flaws. It applies the principles of technical communication in an outstanding way, particularly in the way that it anticipates and fulfills the needs of its audience.
Excellence: Consistently meets high standards in all areas. The entry might contain a single major flaw or a few minor flaws. The entry clearly (if slightly imperfectly) demonstrates an exceptional understanding of technical communication principles.
Merit: Consistently meets high standards in most areas. The entry might contain a small number of major or minor flaws, but it still applies technical communication principles in a highly proficient manner.
Jackie Damrau, a Fellow and Lone Star Community member, chaired the STC International Summit Awards. Deanne Levander, a Fellow, and Preeti Mathur, an Associate Fellow, both from the Twin Cities Chapter, managed the judge teams. Ginny Gilstorf, a Fellow and member of the Twin Cities Chapter, provided judge’s training at both the local/regional and international levels. Many others helped make this competition year a success. Thank you to everyone.
There were 18 judging teams comprising 54 judges from the United States, Canada, and Europe, with one Best of Show judging team. The BoS judges were Debbie Doyle, Chris Hester, and Karen Lane. The International Summit Awards committee thanks all our international judges for their participation. We look forward to you volunteering to serve as a judge in the 2011–2012 STC International Summit Awards.
See www.stc.org/membership/recognition/competitions for more information as it’s available, including a list of community competitions for 2011–2012 and details on this year’s winners.
