Value of STC membership?

[geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA]

 We've spawned an interesting sub-thread here on the value
 of belonging to a professional society (namely STC). We've
 already heard from the networking and "it looks good on
 your resume" camps, but here are a few points that haven't
 yet been raised:

 - If you attend meetings, you meet interesting people with
 familiar as well as unfamiliar problems, and sometimes with
 interesting solutions. It's a lot like techwr-l in that
 way. I've met plenty of people at meetings, and solved (or
 ameliorated) a few problems as a result; I hope I've also
 helped others with their problems. I don't mean to knock
 techwr-l and copyediting-l, but I've got to say that e-mail
 isn't as much fun, or as wide-ranging, as an in-person
 meeting. FWIW, I've never looked for a job based on these
 contacts, and the possibility of doing so at some undefined
 point in the future is a very small component of why I
 attend.

 - The value of society journals and newsletters is that you
 get to read about problems and solutions that you never
 imagined in your own particular context. Then, when the
 problems suddenly arise in your context, you have some of
 the mental tools to deal with them. This has happened to me
 several times. The value of reading broadly as well as
 deeply is that it keeps you from overly narrowing your
 focus, and lets you apply lateral thinking to other
 problems. I enjoy _Technical Communication_ specifically
 for this reason, even though I no longer read all the
 articles; sometimes just knowing that someone is working in
 an area proves useful (I've written personally to several
 authors to ask specific questions, and received
 enlightening answers in response).

 - Re. the quality of articles in Technical Communication
 (TC): To put this in context, you should understand that TC
 is trying to satisfy two very different audiences. On the
 one hand, there is the "academy", university folk who are
 accustomed to and demand a certain amount of theoretical
 rigor, sometimes accompanied by fairly dense writing; on
 the other hand, there are the more numerous "toilers in the
 trenches", who are more interested in tools to help them do
 their daily jobs than in theory. There are plenty of folks
 (myself included) in between. No journal can meet the needs
 of everyone in the audience, particularly when the audience
 is this diverse, and TC is no exception. One solution that
 STC has tried is to spin off a variety of SIGs on
 special-interest topics such as online docs and (soon)
 information design; another has been to produce occasional
 special issues on various topics. Another solution (STC has
 just formed a committee to redesign TC) might be to produce
 two journals, one for the academics and one for the
 workers, though I doubt this will happen; this solution
 already exists in part in the form of the dichotomy between
 TC (more theoretical or research based) and _Intercom_
 (more practical and solutions-based). The current mix of
 articles works pretty well for me. YMMV.

 - Reading about writing is like buying all the Binford
 power tools that the store has to offer: All the
 theoretical knowledge in the world won't do you much good
 without practice. You've got to write to get good at it.
 Reading journals or belonging to a society just provides
 the tools; it's up to the individual to put the tools to
 work and to get good at using them.

 --Geoff Hart     @8^{)}     geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
 Disclaimer: Speaking for myself, not FERIC.

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