Awards Night - A Perspective

By Carrie Warner

I’m really glad I attended this year’s Southwestern Ontario chapter STC Awards night event at McCabe’s in Kitchener. It’s the first awards event I’ve attended in quite some time. As a senior member of the chapter, I don’t manage to attend all of the chapter events anymore – sometimes because of existing household schedules and pre-existing commitments, and sometimes because the events just aren’t terribly relevant to my career or my job in the moment. But I’m really glad I went last week to this year’s event, and I’m going to tell you three reasons why the event was so special for me.

When I arrived, I encountered a new friendly face – and that was worth the price of admission right there. After being a technical communicator in Waterloo Region for more than 15 years, meeting someone new can feel like a bit of a novelty. We technical writers are a close-knit community; it can feel like everyone knows everyone. I look forward to meeting fellow writers, trainers, illustrators, and instructional designers; I enjoy learning where they work, what industry and audiences they write for, and I love swapping and sharing workplace experiences. We do similar jobs, but each job is unique.

When the group settled down to study the delicious menu at McCabe’s, I was introduced to one of the evening’s award recipients. This was my second delight of the evening. This young man, beaming from ear to ear with pride, brought his parents to share in his success. They’d come a long distance to celebrate his well-earned award in technical communication excellence, and they couldn’t have looked more pleased. It warmed my heart to see how loved and supported he was, surrounded by his family, and it reminded me that the local STC chapter is, by its very nature, a family.

See, I have an amazing career and I love what I do for a living. I love it when people’s faces light up when I tell them what I do. It doesn’t occur to people that writing product documentation could be a rewarding, fulfilling, and engaging career. But it doesn’t take the skeptics long to understand that technical writers love taking complex information and making it accessible to everyone. We love it when someone exclaims aloud that a task or activity wasn’t nearly as hard as they thought it would be, thanks to the documentation! Many of us hear often that people don’t use what we produce, but I know it’s there if they ever do need it. After all, few things in life run smoothly all of the time, and occasionally, you’ll find yourself needing to troubleshoot to get back on track, whether it’s your refrigerator making funny noises in the night, or your internet browser closing suddenly with nothing but a cryptic error message popup in its wake.

When you love something as passionately as your own career, it’s important to find like-minded others who share that enthusiasm and nurture your spirit! That’s where my local STC chapter comes in, and that’s why I consider them family. I joined my local chapter in 1998, when I was in my final year of undergrad at the University of Waterloo in the English Rhetoric and Professional Writing co-op program. A wise professor told me that a well-suited professional society network was an excellent pack to run with – they’d help me grow and they’d give me the chance to give back. He couldn’t have been more right about that.

Attending the STC awards event last week was a little like going home, as sentimental as that sounds. I was active early in my career because our local STC chapter had much to teach me and I had so very much to learn. Later in my career, I took on senior, lone writer positions that kept me incredibly busy, and I didn’t make the time to attend events as often as I should have. However, as I found myself in mentoring and management positions, I learned how rewarding and enriching it can be to give back as I taught brand new technical writers the art and the craft as it was once taught to me. Being able to share my knowledge and experience with other writers is far more rewarding than I ever imagined possible.

As I sat at the dinner table, sharing anecdotes and experiences with my fellow writers and newly minted award winners last week, I was reminded of just how valuable and how welcoming my local STC chapter can be. We laughed at recreational period use in written documentation; we shared in the successes of some very talented young writers while encouraging them to write well and write often.

The third wonderful thing about the evening is how I grew a little bit that night amongst the laughter, the sharing, and the celebration. I was suddenly reminded that I’m far more than the sum of my experiences and education because of my own talented peers, mentors, coworkers, colleagues, and fellow STC members who offered me a bit of themselves throughout my career.

When I arrived home, the first thing I did was reach out to the current executive to ask how I could help. A senior technical writer has found her way home again and it’s time to give back where she can.