Newsletter

Sharing our Path
By Vicki Hill

From the Editor

I have been entrusted with this newsletter, and while I’m new on the block, I hope I can present some new themes, encourage continuity, and above all, live up to the high quality of the Capital Letter.

All of us lead hectic professional and personal lives and need quick access to topics centered on technical communications that might interest us for a moment or for a lifetime. In the scamble, however, we may sidestep a readily available and accesible path to information we want to incorporate into our lives. So, it is with our first issue on the Web, I hope this new delivery method will expedite sharing our knowledge.

I want to explore topics you, our dear readers, want to learn more about and to share, so we devise techniques to capture and respond to your feedback interactively.

Exploring New Vistas

I’d like, with your help, to avoid technical jargon for general topics, but also be able to direct specialists to the vast array of resources available. A book review is a time-honored way to open new vistas. In this issue, Maria DiPaulo Greer inspires us in with her passion for diving and photography. Her beautiful and exotic photographs have enriched her life, given her a message and the opportunity to publish her first book.

I’d like to address your day-to-day battles with technology, and in this issue Ribbons and Rows talks about my encounter with the Ribbon which will inhabit Microsoft Office products in your future. To me, the battle is always uneven (see hectic lives above) and I hope we can continue to help each other as the Capital Letter always has.

I’d like to use your stories and analogies to highlight the art and practice of technical communications. Noted with Interest is a collection of anecdotes that illustrates how good intentions sometimes go awry or head off into unanticipated directions. I would love to collect more of these. Just send them in; we can write them up.

From Here to There

So that’s our sampler.

My background is in business analysis and project management, which usually involves my abiding interest in getting the right words and ideas communicated.

With his background in Web design and development—not to mention a brush with the world of marketing, Mikel Murphy is focusing on Internet interactivity and networking possibilities for STCWDC.

I have asked Mikel to begin writing a column on topics that will encompass the world of the Web and how it has become inextricably linked to corporate communications.

Appreciation

Kristen Sweet, Carolyn Klinger, Eddie VanArsdall and Cynthia Lockley have been invaluable in supporting our attempt at creative collaboration and sharing their broad and deep STC and chapter knowledge. And I thank them.