One of the pleasures of technical writing is the annual conference of the Society for Technical Communication. Most technical writers will attend every STC conference that their company will send them to. For the lucky ones, that means attending conferences in Orlando, Hawaii, Chicago, and other exotic places. I, on the other hand, can only attend when it’s in town. This is the first year it’s been in Vancouver.
Last Friday, I was just bubbling over with excitement as I passed through the convention centre’s giant revolving doors. My head was full of visions of well-formed XML, controlled language, and single-sourced documents. At the registration desk, they gave me my ID badge and wallet (for holding the many business cards I’d collect), a tote bag, and a complimentary copy of Douglas Coupland’s City of Glass, then pointed the way towards the free coffee and cookies.
Amazing! All this free stuff! And all I had to do was give them $300 of my company’s money! I could have left the conference right then and felt like I had more than my money’s worth!
The first seminar was about cultural issues in localization, in which I learned that one should avoid hand gestures in translated documents. After that, I attended a philosophical discussion on the nature of human existence and how to represent it using clip art in a PowerPoint presentation. To my great disappointment, I arrived too late to take part in the “Networking Lunch”, which is a great way to collect as many business cards as you can in the shortest time possible. Picture speed dating, but with a lot of golf shirts and tote bags involved.
Finally, the afternoon rolled into view, and I sat in on a discussion on well-formed XML and how to validate it against a DTD. This was the most exciting talk of them all, because every now and then a crow would fly up to the window, squeeze through a hole, and hop around in the ceiling for a bit. Those were the shortest sixty minutes of the conference.
In retrospect, I’m sorry that I didn’t pay the extra money to attend on Saturday as well. I left the convention centre without a single business card in my complimentary wallet, and I had to miss Saturday’s talk about how to become a journal author.
On the other hand, I had some precious memories, a belly full of cookies, and a copy of City of Glass. Incidentally, I’d highly recommend City of Glass to any Vancouverite. If you read it with a pencil in hand, you can have fun underlining the frequent inaccuracies. The photos are very enjoyable too.