This is the keynote presentation for the STC New England Chapter Interchange Conference. It discusses ways for technical communicators to add value and celebrate the victories.

1. ed marsh
stc interchange
april 24, 2020

2.  26-year technical writer
▪ content strategist @ major financial firm
▪ stc associate fellow 2020(!)
▪ content content podcast – edmarsh.com/podcast
▪ lavacon podcast - lavacon.org
▪ stc “speaking of techcomm” podcast co-host
▪ contentcontent.info
 @edmarsh

3. This is the moment
we’ve been waiting for!

4. you are more than “just a writer”
Technical
communicator
Librarian
Translator
Detective

5. technical communication is a
customer service role
• helping people do their job
• accommodating new and existing content
• quickly responding to user requests and updates

6. help your technical
support teams
 are there recurring topics that can be addressed?
 share best practices/war stories
 create connections
 break down silos!

7. what’s in it for me

8. why does it matter?
how does it help me?
how much of my (physical and mental) bandwidth
does this take?
what are the benefits to my team/company/?
what are the costs/risks?
how many resources does this require?
how many resources does this alleviate?

9. governance is not a dirty word
retain knowledge

11.  find out how your users write and
think
 are you speaking the same language as your users?
 are you considering misspellings/typos?
 are there additional keywords you can add?
 generate new topics

12. robohelp and madcap both have
analytics products

14. git (version control) doesn't work
well with pdfs
pdfs are evil on mobile
just because a spec requires pdf, it
doesn’t mean that your users want it

15. let go of the words
(sorry, ginny redish)

16. the number of words you write is not a measure of
success (MoS) or Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
delivery and engagement are
management (and the bottom line) doesn’t care if
you use two spaces after a period, or if you use
‘displays’ or ‘appears’

19. bots
voice (Alexa/Siri/OK Google/IoT)
more!

20. “chunks, not blobs”
-karen mcgrane

22. flare/framemaker/robohelp/webhelp outputs are all:
• html
• css
• javascript

23. docs as code
use the same tools your developers do
• text editors (ms vs code, notepad++)
• unstructured languages
• markdown/asciidoc/restructuredtext
• oXygen xml editor has built-in md conversion
• github/gitlab/microsoft azure
• slack/ms teams
• there are stc-related slacks if you want to get
your feet wet

26.  news
 breaking
 industry
 conference coverage
 research
 what are your customers doing/thinking?
 what are their pain points?
 what are your competitors doing?
 crowdsourcing
 anyone know why x is crashing when y?
 what’s best practice for x?
 you can answer questions, too!

28.  edmarsh.com
 @edmarsh
 edmarsh.com/podcast
 contentcontent.info
 http://www.linkedin.com/in/edmarsh/
 http://www.slideshare.net/theedmarsh/

29. yes, please.