By Bethany Aguad and John Clement
The 2020 STC-FTC Mentoring program has gone fully virtual! This year, our mentor-mentee pairs met each other through a virtual kickoff on Zoom. On November 10, three new pairs of mentors and mentees came together to review the guidelines for the program, meet and do a team-building exercise, and plan their mentoring goals for the rest of the year.
We are thrilled to announce this year’s pairs:
- Debra Johnson and Caitlyn Hunter
- Diane Hogan and Claire Arendas
- Diane Hogan and Perla Pimentel (introduced by email)
- Jessica Nealon and Nancy Jean Lopez
- Alex Garcia and Kurt Ramos (returning pair)
- Bethany Aguad and Julia Southwick (returning pair)
For this year’s fun activity, the pairs tackled a series of challenges with their mentor/mentee.
Write a haiku or limerick about technical communication. Best haiku or limerick wins!
Caitlyn and Debra submitted beautiful haiku about the intersection of technology and writing haikus:
Error 404
I’m having trouble today
haiku not found
Claire and Diane encapsulated what mentoring is all about:
Challenging the youth
A sense of community
Now let us create
Nancy and Jessica spoke to the inner desire we all have to avoid typos:
Tech Comm is cool if
You follow this rule, don’t be
A jerk, Check your work!
Invent a new word and use it in a sentence. Best word and sentence wins!
Nancy submitted:
Quair (n): the messy state of one’s hair during quarantine, when all the hair care products are sold out. “Pardon my quair, I didn’t realize this was a video call.”
Claire Arendas came up with:
Radopulous: American slang for outstanding. “Caitlyn’s haiku was radopulous!”
And Debra had:
Frappled: “I’ve had a bad day…Can’t get anything right…I feel frappled.”
List the errors in the writing sample linked in the chat. You may not use any outside tools. Whoever finds the most errors wins.
Style is one of the big gaols of a good writer. You create a piece of Writing that accomplishes all you set out to accomplish, includes no word that stray from your purpose and is logically coherent and graceful without excess, then you achieved style. Your first draft are like the piece of marble that sculptors have. They look it over and see how to begin, and then they start carving with large tools like a hammer or chisels.
As the scuplture progresses, the sculptors use more fine and more fine tools removing smaller and smaller piecesof marble, until they reach the finnal stage, when they polish the sculpture and place it on its base for display. Marble sculpture are beautiful to look at, completely finished, and serve the purpose of portraying a subject-a person or an object- clear and gracefully. your writing should go through a similar process of close revision until the final product is also beautiful to look at, completely revesed, and serves it’s purpose.
Take a look yourself and see how many errors you can find! Our teams had a hard time resisting doing a full rewrite!
We are thrilled to see what these pairs accomplish this year! If you are interested in serving as a mentor, please contact the program coordinators.