By Kurt Rogahn | Member
It’s ironic that a field with “communication” in its name often involves work done in isolation. To a degree, that is how Eastern Iowa members of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) found themselves at the start of the 1990s.
Then as now, Eastern Iowa technical communicators found employment in aerospace, education, and a then-emerging home computer software industry. Some of them had joined STC. But with no local chapter, Eastern Iowa technical communicators had few opportunities to communicate—much less interact—with others of their own kind.
Back then, Sherri Edwards, now director of a nonprofit agency in Dubuque, was just a short time out of college, working in the technical publications development unit at computer software developer Parsons Technology. As a new company in a new industry, Parsons was hiring new writers like herself, and part of her job was to help technical experts write more clearly. She remembers computer manuals a few inches thick. She joined STC and found it a good national resource, Edwards said, “but we didn’t have a local network of writers and communicators.”
Edwards and another writer started asking around—who else in Cedar Rapids and surrounding areas was doing this kind of work? “The national organization was helpful in providing names and addresses,” Edwards recalls.
Edwards’ letters got around. Marsha Jennerjohn had never heard of STC when someone in her employer’s HR department passed her a letter about an organizational meeting for a new local STC chapter. (Remember, this long preceded widespread use of email and the Internet.) “There were 12 people at the first meeting,” Jennerjohn says. “The first few meetings were pretty much social. The first full-blown meeting had a speaker from National, explaining what STC was.”
The chapter’s charter was issued in early 1991. Edwards, elected the chapter’s first president, left for a job in Illinois not long afterward. But Jennerjohn, once again vice president of the Eastern Iowa Chapter, has remained in the chapter all 20 years.
“I really gained a good understanding of technical writing and what was involved,” Jennerjohn says of what the new chapter had done for her. “My background is engineering and physics. I stumbled into technical writing because I actually like to write.”
Another who was present at the beginning, Irv Emig, recalls the isolation before the chapter formed. “I knew a few technical writers back then, but with a lot of people, they were the only people doing that work in the company.” With formation of the Eastern Iowa Chapter, Emig continues, “you went from a pool of maybe up to five people, to a pool of 15 or 20 or 25 people. You might be in a small group of people using Microsoft Word and you might find someone else from some other company who was using something else.”
It’s still like that, although throughout the past 20 years, the Eastern Iowa Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication has had a shifting core of attendees at monthly chapter meetings. It’s not a huge group—12 attendees or so at a monthly meeting would not be uncommon, just like that first meeting. Speakers still introduce members and guests to new software, new ways of looking at information, and new uses for social media. Members also have learned from each other about new tools, new ways to use tools they have, and new employment opportunities. As the Eastern Iowa Chapter observes its 20th anniversary, members keep meeting members, putting communication back into a line of work that sometimes involves a certain amount of isolation.
Kurt Rogahn has been a member of the Eastern Iowa Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication since 2006.
