Time to Celebrate!

Greetings from your new president! If you’re reading the email version of our newsletter, I hope you’ll take a moment to hop over to www.ebstc.org and admire our beautiful new website! We are LIVE on WordPress, and it’s all thanks to our stellar WordPress migration team headed by Jane Olivera, with Joe Humbert, technology insight from Liz Fraley, and driven to completion by past-president Liz Miller. Kudos to the team for completing this major project, and please check out our Friendly new website! Continue reading →

If you missed Lori Meyer’s January presentation, The Editor as Collaborator: Communication Makes the Difference, you missed some great insights that apply to any career, not just technical editing.

Here are my takeaways: Continue reading →

I still remember my first STC meeting back in the early 1980s with the Silicon Valley chapter. I had only recently realized that the work I was doing was called technical writing.

A year after relocating from the central coast to Union City, I found a job as an office manager/secretary for a small software startup company. I was excited to get paid to use a PC every day! Part of the work involved transcribing my boss’s notes from a yellow pad into a word processor to document how to use his relational database application. Eventually I started writing all of the user documentation myself. At the time, I was totally unaware that this type of writing was special.

One day I noticed a job description in the San Jose Mercury News classified ads that sounded like the work I was doing. Curious to learn more, I arranged for an informational interview with the company. After our chat, they surprised me by offering me that job at a pay rate 15% higher than my current wages. They needed my answer in 48 hours. What a quandary! Continue reading →

What happened during our chapter’s summer vacation? The timing of this year’s two-month break gave EBSTC leaders the perfect opportunity to find a new restaurant for our monthly dinner meetings. On September 8, we had an exceptional turnout for our first event at The Brass Door in San Ramon. Continue reading →

want to make sure EBSTC is providing the resources and professional connections that help our members succeed as technical writers and communicators. Our primary means of achieving this goal is through chapter meetings with great information, good food, and a chance to network with our fellow communicators.

But what about those members who do not or cannot attend the monthly meetings? Knowing how to serve everyone better is important because we are on the brink of launching some exciting and very visible changes that can be fine-tuned to meet more members’ needs. Continue reading →