By Debra Johnson
President
Orlando Central Florida Chapter STC
president@stc-orlando.org
Techniques, methodologies, processes, and standards… or as my team calls it, “TMPS” for short… are as important to us as Technical Communicators (TCs) and especially to me, as I continue to develop out our TechComm discipline at my current company.
It’s a never-ending task to stay relevant and up-to-date. A crucial part of that TMPS is our style guide. Since it is not possible for TMPS to apply to every possible scenario, it is important to have this style guide available for our TCs to reference. It is understood that this guide is our bible for developing our content and deliverables.
So I can tell you… it’s very exciting to have Mary Burns present this month on Building a Style Guide at our chapter meeting.
According to Wikipedia:
A style guide is a set of standards for the writing and design of content/documents, either for general use or for a specific publication, organization, or field. A style guide establishes and enforces style to improve communication. A style guide ensures consistency… whether its within a document and across multiple documents and enforces best practice in usage and in language composition, visual composition, orthography and typography.
For my situation, our TMPS is organized into different phases as they relate to our TC processes. Within each phase, there is a set of activities that the TC should complete in the normal course of their job activities. Along with these activities, we incorporate our style guide and associate these guidelines to activities and/or required steps, tools and best practices to accomplish our deliverables.
Style guides are so important…especially, for newer TCs.
So mark your calendars…for Mary’s presentation May 21, 2015… 6:30pm. We hope to see you at the Winter Park Civic Center!
We need your input on making The Orlando Central FL chapter an even better community than it has been!
We are now the only 9-time winner of the Chapter of Distinction… STC’s highest honor…Let’s keep it going!
See ya at the next meeting!
Debra