This issue of Intercom provides several articles to help you improve your career and expand your professional development, no matter whether you are a technical writer, a tech comm manager, or an academic.
Robert Harrison’s article “Un-Heavy Reading” discusses how to add value to engineering reports. He offers numerous suggestions for improving these reports, including writing the executive summary to a non-technical audience and considering readability and structure. If your job is helping engineers write reports, this article can help you market the benefits of good writing to engineers.
Aubrey Collins has provided a brief history of collaboration from the 1970s to the 2010s in her article “From Satellites to Slack.” She gives several important resources and suggestions for teams to consider when working collaboratively. If you were a technical communicator using collaborative tools during any of these decades, you will remember many of these chief turning points in the field.
Managers looking to hire the right technical writer for their team should read Joshua Durkin and Shelley Fitze’s article “Missing Links.” They provide six missing links in hiring from their forty years of combined experience hiring and training writers.
Kate Schneider, a former MadCap employee, writes about authoring tools and basic concepts that are always important to review on the job, like project setup, project structure, and single sourcing.
Two students from the University of Tennessee interviewed Dr. Kirk St.Amant in the article “Seeing Worldviews and You-Views.” The article provides an overview of Kirk’s research and interests and focuses on new challenges in global communication.
Those teaching in international classrooms will want to read Tiffany Price’s article “Debunking an Assimilationist Approach.” She recommends that instructors adjust their pedagogies to better engage international students. Also for instructors, this issue includes an Academic Conversation column titled “Changing the Game” by Thomas Barker and guest columnist Christina Grant on using multimodal assignments to motivate students.
Meet member Maliha Balala in “Creating Reflective Spaces for Your Writing,” who shares how she spends her off hours using reflection, which helps her to create a mindful approach to the challenges of technical communication.
I hope readers enjoy the content of this January 2017 issue. Visit www.stc.org/intercom/editorial-calendar to see the upcoming themes for 2017 and to submit your own articles for consideration!
