On February 27, 2010, STC organized a seminar for technical communicators. The venue was the office of Continuous Computing, a network service-ready platform solution provider, at the Embassy Golf Links Business Park.

Two seminars were presented on this occasion, the topics were:

• Script Writing for Technical Writers
• Pre-emptive Project Planning

Script Writing for Technical Writers

This seminar was presented by Mr. Surag Ramachandran. Mr. Ramachandran is a Principal technical writer with Oracle. He is also the Scriptwriter, Editor, Director (also including art and visual effects), and Producer of his web series “Bose is always right”.

He introduced us to the concept of script writing. He said that script writing is similar to technical writing. “Script writers write the sounds and visuals. They write what the character speaks not what it thinks”, he stated during the course of his seminar. Similar to technical writing, in script writing too, the writer has to follow certain guidelines. Few of these include:

• Use of Active Voice
• Use of Present Tense
• Maintaining Consistency
• Use of gerunds

He also told us about the Script Elements. These are Slug line, Action, Character, Dialogues, Bracket, and Extension.

This session of the seminar was extremely boosting and eye-opening for me, as before this I did not have the slightest idea that script writing and technical writing could be so related.

For more details, visit http://surag.blip.tv

Pre-emptive Project Planning

After the seminar by Mr. Ramachandran, Mr. Rajdeep Gupta, Vice President STC-India Chapter, presented a seminar on Pre-emptive Project Planning. This seminar was originally planned to be a webinar by Mr. John Vernon Hedtke, founder and President of JVH Communications, but due to certain unavoidable circumstances it had to be presented by Mr. Gupta.

This seminar was about how to anticipate and prevent any glitch that may arise during a project before it actually happens. The presentation dealt with the importance of a Planner (spreadsheet/MS-Excel Sheet), its distribution, and maintenance.

Mr. Hedtke was extremely candid with the content of his seminar and it was ably presented by Mr. Gupta.

I realized how big a difference a simple spreadsheet document can make. Although the seminar was meant for the project managers and team-leads, I, a trainee in technical writing, was able to relate to the importance of this preventative planning mode. This has a major role to play in the technical writing industry, as here also there is a logical flow of events, which self-manages the complete documentation process and each step can be rate- and quality-limiting. Hence, pre-emptive planning should always be considered a key step in any technical writing project and given due importance.

For more details, visit www.hedtke.com

Girish Urwar

PGPTC Batch 3

The Writers Block