July 2018
This month, Meredith has some exciting news for our branches in From The President, our industrious board members are setting up at ITx, and Katie and Vanessa bring you the rave reviews and top tips from our most recent webinar and Christchurch branch event. Then, technical writing is a piece of cake in this month's tasty Let's Tech Communicate.
From the President
June's been a manic month for me, between attending the Promapp conference in Auckland, preparing for the ITx Conference in Wellington, and travelling to exotic small town New Zealand for dog agility judging. Of course, judging agility dogs is a little different to judging technical communicators, but I’m super excited about seeing our awards finalists this week! I was delighted to see the number of incredible nominations we received – it's fantastic to see just how much our members give back to our industry! You guys are awesome.
Congratulations to Steve Moss, Emma Harding and Grant Mackenzie for making the final three!
I'm super excited about July!
TechCommNZ lands at ITx!
As you read this, our industrious TechCommNZ board members are setting up a booth at the TSB Bank Arena and Shed 6, Wellington. They are armed with jet planes, pens, shameless TechCommNZ propaganda and their winning smiles, all in the name of bringing tech comms into the spotlight at ITx this week!
Seeing our way - Accessibility for the web and print
Katie Haggath brings you the rave review and top tips to take away from Sarah and Harriet’s webinar: Seeing our way - Accessibility for the web and print. A world unfolded before her eyes, if you can excuse the turn of phrase. Some of the things they said seemed so obvious in hindsight she was ashamed to have missed them for so long. And some things were so different from her experience of the world as to be utterly fascinating.
Sarah explained “we called this webinar ‘Seeing our way’ because it’s a statement of positive intent that you often hear in business and the community. ‘Yes,’ you say, ‘I can see my way to doing that…’ I am often feeling my way in this work. The commitment is there, and the feeling that it is all possible.”
Branch report: What do you know about who you know?
Vanessa Roberts brings us the June branch report for Christchurch’s most recent event: What do you know about who you know? It was great to see such a huge turn-out for this event – we even had some non-member attendees! It was also pretty great to have done the networking part of the evening first, because it meant our own behaviour was fresh in our minds when Paul was talking.
Here are the key messages Vanessa took away from Paul’s presentation…
Let's Tech Communicate
Katie must have been hungry when she was collecting this month’s LTC together, because quite to her surprise there’s a bit of theme going on. Slap some ketchup on your corndog and get ready to throw your chips at the other team’s supporters – it turns out technical writing isn’t much different from the World Cup. Then it turns out the recipe for success in technical writing is…er…recipe writing, and there’s nothing cheesy about using stock images (as long as they’re the right flavour). Finally, get salty with a bit of high tech humor, weenies and Little Red Riding Hood’s basket of treats. Technical writing is a piece of cake.