The Leadership Program at the STC 2015 Summit will be Sunday, 21 June , from 8 AM to noon. The program offers an opportunity for STC community members to get together for sharing and learning, and it won’t be the same without YOU. There are a number of reasons you’ll want to attend the Leadership Program.
I knew I needed a break when I looked at a fortune cookie and the first thing I saw was a comma splice. Instead of reading the fortune, I immediately started looking for superstar word wielder Marcia Riefer Johnston to get a second opinion (we were both at Information Development World). Once my assessment was confirmed – she also said “comma splice” before making any other comment – I started thinking about editing and how to identify good editing.
The strict “Street, City, State, Zip code” format doesn’t always translate well overseas. In the UK, we have a unique postcode for roughly every 20 houses, so you only need a customer’s postcode and house number to be able to pinpoint their location. We don’t have States and not everyone lives in a city. This means the format of people’s addresses can vary, but not cause problems for the postman. If you force the user to follow the US format, or use the US format in your examples, they might struggle to know what to enter.
When we are determined to do something (such as learn to swing dance, play the guitar, or earn a degree), we will overcome obstacles and challenges to achieve our goal. Persistent setbacks might discourage us, maybe slow us down, but we won’t give up because we are determined to succeed. We rely on instructors and mentors to teach us these skills, and our motivation helps us to press on. We know that the reward for our efforts is the ability to swing dance, play the guitar, or earn a degree, and we are proud of our accomplishment.
On the 24th October, The Queen opened a new gallery at The Science Museum, called “The Information Age”. The Information Age gallery takes visitors on a journey through the history of modern communications, from the telegraph to the smartphone. Exhibits on show include the broadcast equipment behind the BBC’s first radio programme in 1922, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer, which hosted the first website
The other day, I got to thinking about tasks and procedures. We had just remodeled our kitchen, and I was flipping through the user manual for our new dishwasher, looking for a section that walked me through the process of washing dishes from start to finish. But the user manual in my hands offered no such trajectory.
How do you think of yourself in your editing role? Is each document, article, topic, or book by the same author or team of writers an isolated editing task? Does each task seem to start from scratch as if you’d not edited that author’s work before? Or is each subsequent edit you deliver informed by your previous suggestions and comments? Do subsequent documents indicate that the writer “got it the first (or last) time”?
I recently saw a post on LinkedIn from someone who wondered about the value of being an STC member. I know that most people who read this post are already STC members, but sometimes even members need reminders on why we’re here. This month and next, I have decided to share my personal STC story. I hope that my own relative success in this delightful profession will interest you and help you stick it out if you’re thinking of moving on.
At the Communities reception at the Summit somebody spoke about the difficulties of left-handed people using household appliances, technologies, and software. If you are left-handed then you probably have problems using everyday things because they are designed for right-handed use.
On the 9th September 2014, Apple announced a range of health-based wearable devices that will help capture biometric data. According to The Guardian, the software will allow developers to build bespoke health apps for a broad range of medical needs. This, the newspaper states, is part of a trend to make healthcare more personalised.