Caught Sketching

By Elizabeth Alley | STC Senior Member

I attended the STC Technical Communication Summit in Washington, DC, my fourth conference over the seven years I’ve worked in technical communication. I knew I would be taking in a lot of information over a few days, and I knew that I’d be sketching, so I bought an unlined Moleskine Cahier journal for note-taking.

Sketching is just my normal mode of being. I always carry a sketchbook with me, as well as my favorite pens. And colored pencils. And watercolors.

I have kept a sketchbook since high school, but started carrying a sketchbook regularly in the late 1990s and obsessively around 2006. One of my high school art teachers told me that if I wanted to get better at art, I should draw from life, so I sketched trees around my school, furniture in my home (with typical teen-aged commentary on my mother’s taste in furniture), and self-portraits. I still focus on these everyday things, but I’ve evolved from a tentative, semi-secret sketcher to someone who will sketch people at a conference and then show the world via social media.

I love how sketching improves the hand-eye-brain connection, improving my artwork overall by helping me to make design decisions more instinctively. It also helps me remember more about where I am and what I’m doing than I would otherwise. Sketching a scene helps recall the feeling of it as well as its appearance.

Sharing sketches with the world adds another dimension to the practice of sketching. On-location sketching has become a global phenomenon, with groups like Urban Sketchers helping people learn about sketching and share sketches on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr. From these shared sketches it is easy to see that anyone can sketch; all you need is a pencil or pen, some paper, and a willingness to slow down and pay attention to what is in front of you.

What I focus on when sketching depends on the day. A normal work day might find me sketching my coffee cup or the many trees in my hometown of Memphis. When I travel, I might have the opportunity to sketch a landmark like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Barcelona’s Sagrada Família, or a Whataburger in Pensacola—whatever is there, I’ll sketch it.

When I attend any kind of talk or panel (or sometimes a party or a wedding), I sketch the people involved. Sketching helps me to pay attention, and I retain information much better than if I don’t sketch. Studies have shown that sketching improves memory, so the benefits of combining sketching with note-taking are backed up by science!

For the Summit, I knew to expect an intense schedule and I wanted to make sure I paid attention, so I began sketching people during the opening session, starting with STC CEO Liz Pohland, and capturing 16 different hand gestures by keynote speaker Seth Mattison. The interesting content drove me to take better notes, and the analytical and creative sides of my brain came together to make my notes into more of a story.

It was the storytelling aspect that kept me going through the Summit and tied together sketching and note-taking with technical communication. Sometime during the first day, maybe between Rahul Prabhakar’s session on social media and Leah Guren’s session on Super Success Hacks, I realized that, as a technical communicator and as an artist, everything I do is communication. At work, I help my colleagues by providing them with information to do their jobs better, and my artwork tells stories about people and places. Thanks to this realization, I have all of this good information from the Summit, and I’m more encouraged than ever to keep telling stories through my artwork.

See more of Elizabeth’s Summit sketches online on STC’s Notebook blog, https://www.stc.org/notebook/.