For many years, I have been thinking about the “process” of creating technical documentation.

When I share my “10 Steps” with other technical communicators, I typically absorb many of their unique “processes” – thus refining my own approach! So the following “10 Steps” has grown into an efficient and on-going crowd-sourcing exercise.

Another twist: I try to keep “tools” out of this process, which I know can be difficult, as “the medium can often be the message” (to paraphrase the great Marshall McLuhan). A tool that lets me “block” information may get structured differently, for example. I also don’t focus on project planning, which is a key part of mapping out milestones and hitting deadlines!

But I would like to get your thoughts. When constructing an online help center, a user manual, a quick start guide, or even an instructional video, etc., what are some basic steps you regularly take – or questions you regularly ask – as you build the materials?

Take a look at these steps and send your feedback to stcpmc.president@gmail.com! Let’s improve the basic process so that new tech writers gain a head start on developing their own processes!

1. Audience Analysis: What are the key questions did we need to answer for users? What were the most frequent friction points? What are trying to solve? What existing knowledge does the user have?
2. Subject Matter Expert Interview: What SME knowledge will be valuable for users? Does this knowledge need to be broken into smaller, manageable parts? What terms did the SME use that needed to be defined?
3. Product Usage: Use the product as a new and expert user would; learn the industry knowledge and nomenclature of a typical user. What are they trying to accomplish? What challenges do you face as a new user? What are common pain points would drive you to contact a Help Support team?
4. Taxonomy Building: Which technical terms needed to be explained? What style guide should be applied? Do we need a glossary?
5. Design Analysis: What brand format do I use? What logo? What company colors? What fonts?
6. Structure Analysis: Do users need to follow a linear process? If yes, apply numbered steps. Or is this more of a troubleshooting asset? If yes, rank Q&A by most to least popular?
7. Visual/Graphic Analysis: Will images add value? Do they need to be embellished with arrows, highlighters, etc? Should we show realistic “in use” photos? Or should we use artwork?
8. Review Process: Do SMEs need to review? Should we send to end users for testing? Should we send to internal folks for testing?
9. User Feedback: Can you test with a few users before you launch? How will improvements be made after launch? Any steps or user expectations that you missed?
10. Maintenance: Should SME’s review this annually to keep it updated? What if new features are released? What’s the review cycle?

Thank you to everyone who submitted nominations for our President and Treasurer/Secretary elected offices. After vetting all candidates, the final nominees have been selected. Get to know your candidates before the election takes place. Keep an eye on your email in the next week or so for the official election process.

PRESIDENT

Rob Sims
Rob has been our President for the past year and has spent over 30 years in technical communications roles within financial services, US FDA-regulated software, and supply chain industries. Rob’s output has included information architecture planning, online help writing, user guide writing, how-to videos (created in Camtasia), and thought leadership materials. If elected President, Rob will focus on the next generation of technical communicators and how they can master topics such as UX, customer experience and instructional design, among others. Rob has presented at a previous STC-PMC event about how the technical communicator can deliver value for marketing content. He is currently managing online help and help content architecture for a leading supply chain standards organization.

TREASURER/SECRETARY 

Sam Lee
He started his career as a program coordinator in the intellectual property management industry. To advance his career, he decided to study in a particular specialized technological so he moved into aviation, where he studied at an aircraft maintenance engineering program. While working full-time, he received his Master of Technology Management and Master of Electrical Engineering degrees. He also decided to contribute his efforts to the aircraft certification process to meet airworthiness standards. He worked as a Senior Avionics Engineer for the Engineering department of DAO (Design Approval Organization). He designed avionics systems, wrote test plans and compliance reports, and conducted test witnesses. He is currently working for Leonardo Helicopter (AWPC; AgustaWestland Philadelphia Corporation) as a senior Avionics System Engineer. He completed a Technical Writing Certificate at the University of Waterloo. He also holds Masters of Engineering (Electrical Engineering) and Technology Management for engineering and applied science. Sam is a member of STC and is also the P&P SIG Manager. He served as one of the P&P SIG Co-Managers & Pacesetter committee members in 2022.

Chapter elections will start on Tuesday, July 11th, 2023, and will end at noon on Friday, July 14th.  Only STC-PMC members who were registered members as of July 1 will be allowed to vote. Those members will be sent an email with voting instructions.  Please be sure to vote! It will only take moments to do, and it’s critical to the continuation of our chapter.  If you are a chapter member and you don’t receive your election email, please contact president@stcpmc.org.

As the Directors are volunteers and do not need to be elected in, the new Directors will be announced along with the winners of the election on July 14th.

Good luck to our candidates, and we appreciate all who have stepped up to help the chapter!

We’re proud to feature an article from Steve Cohen, an STC-PMC member and creator of “The History of Chemistry” podcast. Steve’s latest book is O Mg – How Chemistry Came to Be – check it out!  FYI, I own Steve’s science travel book, America’s Scientific Treasures, and it’s a must-have for uncovering our country’s scientific places. Thanks for the article, Steve! Rob

From childhood on, I have drawn cartoons. I also have PhD in chemistry. Shortly before the COVID pandemic, I began writing and drawing a graphic history of chemistry. The project lasted two and a half years, well into the pandemic, and was published last year as O Mg! How Chemistry Came to Be, by World Scientific.

While technical communicators generally think of their work as instruction manuals, webpages, or help files, writing about scientific topics is another form of technical communication. Chemistry is especially well-suited for illustration. Consider molecular structures, chemical reactions and
their mechanisms, and laboratory apparatus, all provided in diagrams in textbooks and research papers. Therefore, a history of chemistry in a graphic format—a popular literary form now—seems apropos.

I call chemistry the invisible science:
(1) Chemists study invisible things: atoms and molecules.
(2) Many chemists, especially women, were written out of scientific papers and even general chemical history.
(3) Finding a chemistry book for the non-expert in a bookshop is difficult. Fewer than 3% of all science titles in a bookstore are chemistry-related.
For these reasons, chemistry itself needs an advocate among the general public.

To continue the momentum after the book was published, I decided to delve deeper via a podcast, “The History of Chemistry,” into chemistry topics that I glossed over in a short book. Speaking of scientific topics is also technical communication. The target audience is the interested layperson. Chemistry is loaded with reactions, mathematics describing the reactions, and technical terms and ideas requiring explanations, all of which present severe challenges for the technical communicator in a purely verbal setting.

The technical aspects (recording equipment and sound engineering) I already knew. I read up on designing podcasts, and bought usage rights for snippets of music for the “theme,” and developed a unique catch-phrase at the end of every episode: “Brave the elements!” I used my graphic knowledge to invent a logo via Photoshop, for use on podcast apps. The average length per episode is 20 minutes, which is about all my voice can handle in one take at a microphone.

My modus operandi is to present overarching ideas of chemistry with no mathematics and little technical jargon. For example, I do no balancing of equations, and no math beyond an occasional ratio. I have not used that chemical word that freaks out students, the “mole.” Rather, my method is to relate the evolution of chemistry to local events, history, arts, culture, and politics. For example, you may know of Alexander Borodin, the composer whose music was incorporated into the musical “Kismet.” His occupation was chemist, and he was a friend of Dimitri Mendeleev, who invented the Periodic Table. You may have heard of Chaim Weizmann, first president of Israel. He also was a chemist who helped the British Government win World War I, and used his influence to gain Israel’s independence. You have heard of President Herbert Hoover, but did you know that his was a mining engineer by trade, and his wife, Lou Henry Hoover, was a geologist who knew Latin? They together translated the classic Renaissance work De Re Metallica into English—and is still the definitive English version. All these factoids, and many more, I incorporate into my podcast.

To bridge the humanities-science gap in my podcast, I invite experts to talk of a topic that relates to chemistry for a few minutes. I include an expert on Biblical Hebrew to chat on metals in the Hebrew Bible; an art-history professor to chat about scientific art in the 18 th century; a brewer to chat about pH and beer-brewing; a writer of classical program notes to talk on Alexander Borodin’s life; an English professor to chat on Holocaust survivor, chemist, and writer Primo Levi; and more.

I pull no punches: I talk of pollution, chemical warfare, and sexism in chemistry departments. These topics show that chemists are a product of their times. There are over 60 episodes with dozens more planned, covering prehistoric times to the present, hosted at Buzzsprout (https://thehistoryofchemistry.buzzsprout.com) but available on most apps. Listen Notes rates it in the top 10% of all podcasts, Apple rates it 4.1 out of 5, Podbay ranks it #3, and Chartable lists it as #6 of all US Chemistry podcasts.

When we talk of technical communication, remember that technical subjects like science itself need to be described in an unambiguous, understandable way for laypeople. There is a reason that Carl Sagan, Rachel Carson, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson have a following. With scientific misinformation so easily transmitted around the globe, science communication, a form of technical communication, is needed more than ever.