Celebrating Technical Communication – STC’s 50th Annual Conference

By Susan Alexander

Preamble

Late in November 2002 I received a letter from STC informing me that my proposal to present a paper was accepted. I subsequently volunteered to moderate the session. This meant I was responsible for reviewing the presentations, introducing the session and both speakers, and ensuring that we kept within our time limit. Ron Statt my co-presenter, and a senior member of STC, works for the SAS Institute in Cary, North Carolina and has over 10 years experience. From around February 2003 onwards, Ron and I were in touch by e-mail discussing issues such as whether we had to use a standard template, how many handouts to bring to the conference, and our session plan.

The Venue

The Wyndham Anatole is a splendid hotel with several conference halls and meeting rooms of various sizes. The one where the Keynote Address was held could have probably seated around 3000 people. The range of artifacts from different countries that are housed in the hotel dazzles most visitors.

STC support for speakers

I can only describe the support given to speakers as superb. Several snail mails were sent to speakers over a period of six months to request and confirm hardware requirements, grant copyrights to STC, and provide advice on preparing presentations. E-mails reminded us of deadlines and how to upload our papers, presentations and other supporting materials to the STC site. Meticulous attention to detail ensured that all presentation aspects were covered.

Physical arrangements were equally well thought out with room monitors to ensure feedback forms were filled and handouts distributed. Hardware engineers are on call – and we certainly needed their help when we were a plug point short.

The Speaker Orientation Session

The Speaker Orientation Session was held on Sunday afternoon and was conducted by Paula Berger who works as a consultant in Italy and the US. She outlined several facets of preparing for a presentation ranging from the need to practice your presentation several times to having a backup plan in case of equipment failure.

Where is my co-presenter? 

Ron had told me that he would contact me when he reached the hotel at around 6 p.m. on Sunday. However, when I got back to my room after the Speaker Orientation, a voice-mail from Ron informed me that he was stranded in Atlanta and struggling to get a connecting flight to Dallas because bad weather had caused him to miss his scheduled flight. I could not help pondering that our session title was a little too paradoxical given the current circumstances.  After telling the airline that a ticket for Monday night would not help his cause (we were to present on Monday at 11 a.m.) Ron finally managed to reach Dallas at around 1 a.m. on Monday morning.

Sunday evening

Decided to attend the Region 6 Reception as well as the Welcome Reception. At the entrance to the Welcome Reception everyone was handed a Bingo sheet with a difference. No numbers were on it. Instead, you had to find people with different attributes such as “International Member”, “Documentation Manager” and so on, and get their signatures on the appropriate square. This icebreaker led to meeting several interesting folks from around the globe.

The Session

My paper titled Control Your Destiny was in the Professional Development stem. The session that I moderated had the same title – and comprised two papers, my own and Ron Statt’s. Ron’s paper was titled, More than a Job, Choose how You Want to Work.  The theme of both presentations was the need to assume charge of our professional lives to achieve the result you want. Ron talked of how to do this as an employee and I discussed this from the stance of an independent contractor.

As we had reviewed other’s presentations we could each link to aspects that the other would discuss. I was relieved that the session went off without any hitches and none of us exceeded the agreed time limit. This meant we had 10 minutes for the Q and A component and could address several questions.

Familiar faces

I enjoyed meeting Kathlyn Auten, Susan Jensen, and Carol Barnum who have all been Keynote speakers at the India Chapter conferences. The picture you see here is courtesy Douglas Dow of the STC Lone Star Chapter, who attended the 3^rd India Chapter Conference in Bangalore. 

Carol Barnum and Susan at the 50^th Annual STC Conference

(Susan Alexander is Secretary of STC India. You can contact Susan at susan@stc-india.org)

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