Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
January/February 2003
Member Spotlight: Intergenerational Stories from New Zealand
In our member spotlight this time, we take a look at another chapter from Region 8: New Zealand. STCNZ represents about 50 professional and technical communicators from around New Zealand.
A Family Tradition
Jessica Parsons, Vice President and Newsletter Editor of Chatterbox, the STCNZ newsletter, has technical writing in her genes! Her grandfather, Ralph Immel, and her mother, Pam Parsons, are both technical writers.
Ralph Immel started as a reporter and moved on to write manuals for the C-47 at Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, California. He writes, “At that time technical writing was not precisely defined, but as technical writers we had to read engineering drawings or blueprints, consult with engineers, and obtain useful information from factory personnel to obtain accurate information for the operation and maintenance handbooks whose format was precisely defined by the Army Air Corps.” A problem they often faced occurred on weekends when “the engineering project manager left on Friday afternoon telling the technical writer that the report ‘is now your problem and has to be printed by Monday morning.’ Fortunately, a lot of small printers in the Los Angeles area were willing to work outlandish hours and charge outlandish prices to achieve those Monday morning deadlines. This situation also enabled research into finding restaurants that served excellent breakfast at 3AM on weekends.”
For Pam Parsons, technical writing turned out to be “my passport to domestic travel in a modestly adventurous way. Till then the West Coast had been my only geographical experience, but from 1979 to 1987, working first as technical writer and later as technical editor, my geographical horizons expanded. Michigan! Long Island! Jones Beach! New York! Philadelphia! Gainesville, Florida! Huntsville, Alabama! New Orleans! Conferences! Customer applications! Newsletter stories! Fond memories as I sat in my office weeks later, transcribing 60 or so hours of taped interviews...”
Great Explainers
At the tail end, Jessica Parsons says, “Coming from what surely must rank a unique position of a third-generation technical writer, I admit in a small voice that I paid no attention to my heritage when choosing my profession. None. Neither my mother nor grandfather applied any pressure to join these ranks of ‘great explainers.’ No, all they did was pass on the genes, the obsession to read and analyze everything, and the certain knowledge that communication is the best game in town.”
The Complete Story
To read the rest of their stories in their own words,
go to the New Zealand chapter web site,
click News – Newsletter – November 2002 issue and go to page
2. These stories are written as part of the STC@50 celebration and appear
in Chatterbox in their original uncut versions.
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