Re: Is the STC worth it?

["William Sherman" <bsherman77 -at- embarqmail -dot- com>]

Long ago, I had a friend who joined STC in Orlando, FL. I think she saw it 
more as a social club to meet guys than to learn about technical 
communications. I think she became disillusioned with the results of both. I 
didn't know anyone in STC or who had been in it. By that time, I had worked 
with over 200 technical writers in Connecticut, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, 
North Carolina, and Florida. I knew of it, through CE Weekly and PD News, 
and concluded that no one seem to promote them except STC.

Finally, I had a job down in Orlando and the STC conference was at Disney, 
so our company paid our STC memberships and sent us so it would look good 
and we'd learn something. To be fair, I did learn a lot. Some was very 
useful, and some was not what STC expected anyone to learn.

Remember, I have made comments here before that I find it annoying our 
profession has moved from the responsibilities of learning all aspects of a 
topic until we are expert enough to produce quality documentation for the 
customer to use to being merely a reporter that interviews others and then 
regurgitates it in common English for the customer. Maybe that is why I hold 
the Yahoo "news" articles and the Yahoo "journalists" in disdain with their 
poorly written articles that have almost no meat to them. I am not a 
secretary. I am a technical writer. I learn it and understand it enough to 
find errors in the system or the engineers' materials. I am a value-added 
check in the process. Most writers I work with are the same way.

While about half of that STC conference did point to using new technologies 
and methods, with seminars on XML, publishing tools, and such, one of these 
was how to get your engineers to talk to you by bribing them with cookies. I 
kid you not. It had to be the basis of Penny and The Big Bang Theory.

After my membership ran out that year, I didn't renew.

A few years later, I was back in Orlando again, and one of the writers I 
worked with asked if I belonged to STC. He had a few unflattering things to 
say about the Orlando Chapter. According to him, a lady running the STC 
chapter years ago struck a deal between some of the companies and one of the 
universities to teach a technical writer curriculum by an "STC certified 
technical writer instructor" so students could get degrees in technical 
writing and supply the many companies with new graduate technical writers at 
a cheap rate. This made the companies happy as they could hire degreed 
technical writers for very low pay, made the school happy because they got 
lots of students, and made this STC lady happy drawing a salary from the 
university.

Again according to him, this is why rates for technical writers in Orlando 
are embarrassingly low. Women with a tech writing degree could work at $10 
an hour as a tech writer rather than $6 an hour in Wal-Mart or such.

If that is true, I'd find it hard to support an organization that did 
something like that. I have noticed the percentage of women with technical 
writing degrees seemed out of proportion in Orlando to other areas in the 
country, so maybe there is some truth to his story. And my friend from years 
ago had mentioned they pushed her to sign up to get a technical writing 
degree, which made no sense to her as she was really an AS-400 programmer 
with a BSCS.

YMMV



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Cardimon, Craig" <ccardimon -at- M-S-G -dot- com>
To: <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2014 3:25 PM
Subject: Is the STC worth it?