Thursday, I’ll be speaking at a college class about technical editing. It’s one of my favorite things to do. I feel an obligation to my field to pay forward the gift my career has given me. I was one of the lucky ones. I stumbled onto technical writing. I managed to get beyond what I thought the field was and discovered, for a closet geek like me ,that it was a perfect place to balance my love of writing with my love of helping others. But I don’t want current and future generations of students to perpetuate misconceptions about technical communication. So when I am asked to talk about my job, I usually accept. After all, it’s not a hard talk when you speak from experience and a genuine love for the field.
Thursday’s talk is at Atlantic Armstrong State University in Savannah, GA. A connection from grad school created this opportunity. Although the unfun part happens today and tomorrow – creating the dreaded PowerPoint. I’ve tried presentations without PowerPoint but discovered for their sanity and mine we needed something to look at while I talked (and talked) for an hour. Have I ever said I can really talk a lot? Well you should know that by the name of my other blog.
So loquaciousness aside (like my scrabble word?), I’m really looking forward to talking about what I do with students. Invariably it always reminds me just how lucky I am and why I love what I do. How do you pay it forward?
The buzz in the online world the past few weeks is about Google's new Internet browser Chrome. In the Technical Communication world, the buzz is around Google's choice to create a help book to explain Chrome. Why the buzz? Well it was done in comic format. I'm not exactly sure why the rest of the Technical Communication world is up in arms. I thought it was a fun play on documentation and not meant to be the complete resource on *how to* use chrome. To understand this momentous project causing all the rage, I naturally turned to our own Blackbaud Technical Writer, Steve Stegelin. Most of you may not know it, but Steve started his career as a cartoonist and technical illustrator. In the meantime he's done some pretty impressive work (on non-Blackbaud hours). Lately, you can find him several places.
In our cube this morning (yup, I'm the fortunate one who sits with Steve every day), I asked him a few questions about this Google Chrome thing. I wanted to get to the bottom of the hoopla.
Lindsey :
Why is this Google Chrome comic such a big deal?
Steve:
While it's obviously a good bit of marketing gimmickry to promote Chrome, I think it's a great method to explain just what makes it so different from the other browsers out there. Having Scott McCloud use caricatures of the various developers and designers to pass along the message also really helps give it a personal voice, which is a bit of genius, making it less about the corporate Google than about the team of individuals working to make Chrome succeed. With the open source-ness of Chrome, communicating in this way really helps promote its "by the people for the people" message. And as a fan of the comic medium, it's actually quite validating to see the format promoted as such a "legitimate" form of communication by a corporation such as Google.
Lindsey:
Who's Scott McCloud and why should we know him?
Steve:
When I first started reading comics, Scott was the creator of the fun indie comic "Zot!" He's since gone on to become the closest thing comics has to a "resident scholar" on the sequential art form. You may've seen his theses as graphic novels: "Understanding Comics", "Reinventing Comics", and "Making Comics." Each is an entertaining and informative analysis of the comics medium, from the role of the reader, artist, and historian/forecaster. In particular, I think "Understanding Comics" is an invaluable read, not just for comics but for any type of communication of sequence to an audience… I find myself applying some of the thought discussed in that book to my own procedural writing in our user guides, to great effect.
Lindsey:
Are you ready to do the entire Raiser's Edge documentation set in comic form? ;-)
Steve:
LOL. That might take a while…
Here's a sample of the book:
