Page 1 Hillbilly TechTalk | www.stc-arkansas.org September/October 2006 Hillbilly TechTalk Newsletter of the Arkansas Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication Sep./Oct. 2006 P atrick Moore, the Arkansas chapter treasurer, has received an award for Distinguished Technical Communication in the 2005 Frank R. Smith Outstanding Journal Article competition for “Froam Wordsmith to Communication Strategist: Heresthetic and Political Maneuvering in Technical Communication,” an essay he co- authored with Melinda Kreth. You can read their award-winning essay in the August 2005 issue of Technical Communication. Congratulations! Officers Selected to Serve the Arkansas Chapter of STC 2006-2007 Keith Dover, President George (Keith) Dover received his degree in Professional and Technical .) in 2000 from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR). He has served tours of duty in the U.S. Army, U.S. Army National Guard, and the U.S. Army Reserve from June 1979 to July 2004 when he recently retired as a major. Dover’s writing credits include numerous military essays and articles. A significant recent work of his was to assist in the production of a written monograph for the Military District of Washington in support of “Operation Noble Eagle,” and the homeland defense of America. There he was assigned to the Center of Military History, Fort Lesley J. McNair, DC as the executive officer of the “Operation Noble Eagle” MHD Task Force to document and record the attacks of 9-11-01 on the Pentagon. He returned home on June 30, 2002 after a nine-month deployment working in the Washington, DC area and inside the Pentagon. His civilian affiliations include: past president and public relations chairman, Little Rock Civitan Club, Little Rock, Arkansas; public relations chairman, American Legion Department of AR; lifetime member of the American Legion [Post #1]- Little Rock, Arkansas; member of the Arkansas Veterans Coalition; past president of the UALR Public STC SOCIETY FOR TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION Year at a Glance Our Next Meeting October 25, 2006 » STC Web-telephone seminar November 2-4, 2006 » Region 5 Conference November 3-8, 2006 » ASIS&T November 8, 2006 » Tax Tips for Writers November 11, 2006 » STC Web-telephone seminar December 6, 2006 » Holiday Party December 9, 2006 » STC Web-telephone seminar January 13, 2007 » Business and Planning Meeting February 10, 2007 » Documentation Project Management March 10, 2007 » Meeting and possible attendance of new National Chapter Director April 14, 2007 » Topic TBD May 13-16, 2007 » Ascend Making the Most of Adobe Acrobat University of Arkansas at Little Rock SUA 106C 2801 S. University Ave., Little Rock, Arkansas 72204 » Multimedia designer Fredie Smith will guide participants through the following hands-on activities: » Adding metadata to your PDFs » Creating professional and portable PDF forms » Preparing your PDF for professional printing For more information, see our Web site: www.stc-arkansas.org October 14, 2006 Continued on page 2 Get more details about these events and more online: www.stc-arkansas.org
Newsletter of the Arkansas Chapter of theSociety for Technical Communication
Sep./Oct. 2006
Patrick Moore, the Arkansas chapter
treasurer, has received an award for Distinguished Technical Communication in the 2005 Frank R. Smith Outstanding Journal Article competition for “Froam Wordsmith to Communication Strategist: Heresthetic and Political Maneuvering in Technical Communication,” an essay he co-authored with Melinda Kreth. You can read their award-winning essay in the August 2005 issue of Technical Communication.
Congratulations!
Officers Selected to Serve the Arkansas Chapter of STC2006-2007
Keith Dover, PresidentGeorge (Keith) Dover received his degree in Professional and Technical .) in 2000 from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR). He has served tours of duty in the U.S. Army, U.S. Army National Guard, and the U.S. Army Reserve from June 1979 to July 2004 when he recently retired as a major.
Dover’s writing credits include numerous military essays and articles. A significant recent work of his was to assist in the production of a written monograph for the Military District
of Washington in support of “Operation Noble Eagle,” and the homeland defense of America. There he was assigned to the Center of Military History, Fort Lesley J. McNair, DC as the executive officer of the “Operation Noble Eagle” MHD Task Force to document and record the attacks of 9-11-01 on the Pentagon. He returned home on June 30, 2002 after a nine-month deployment working in the Washington, DC area and inside the Pentagon.
His civilian affiliations include: past president and public relations chairman, Little Rock
Civitan Club, Little Rock, Arkansas; public relations chairman, American Legion Department of AR; lifetime member of the American Legion [Post #1]- Little Rock, Arkansas; member of the Arkansas Veterans Coalition; past president of the UALR Public
STCSOCIETY FOR
TECHNICALCOMMUNICATION
Year at a Glance
Our Next Meeting
October 25, 2006 » STC Web-telephone
seminar
November 2-4, 2006 » Region 5 Conference
November 3-8, 2006 » ASIS&T
November 8, 2006 » Tax Tips for Writers
November 11, 2006 » STC Web-telephone
seminar
December 6, 2006 » Holiday Party
December 9, 2006 » STC Web-telephone
seminar
January 13, 2007 » Business and Planning
Meeting
February 10, 2007 » Documentation Project
Management
March 10, 2007 » Meeting and possible
attendance of new National Chapter Director
April 14, 2007 » Topic TBD
May 13-16, 2007 » Ascend
Making the Most of Adobe Acrobat
University of Arkansasat Little Rock
SUA 106C2801 S. University Ave.,
Little Rock, Arkansas 72204
» Multimedia designer Fredie Smith will guide participants through the following hands-on activities:
» Adding metadata to your PDFs
» Creating professional and portable PDF forms
» Preparing your PDF for professional printing
For more information, see our Web site:www.stc-arkansas.org
October 14, 2006
Continued on page 2
Get more details about these events and more online:
Relations Student Society of America; and founding member of the Phi Chi Sigma National Veterans Fraternity at UALR.
Recently, the Little Rock Civitan Newsletter Dover edits was selected as the First Place Winner in the Civitan International Newsletter Competition.
He is serving his first term as president of the Arkansas chapter of the Society for Technical Communication, and is a Senior Member of STC.
Mary Corder, Vice President Mary Corder is a senior member of the STC. She received her her M.A. in Professional and Technical Writing from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and her B.A. in English from the University of Central Arkansas.
For nearly the past six years, Corder has worked as a technical writer with Acxiom Corporation, where she writes primarily developer-oriented technical documentation for a software engineering team. She has extensive experience creating online and print documentation for a variety of audiences and has designed and administered numerous internal product Web sites.
She has published several book reviews in Technical Communication and is a member of Sigma Tau Chi, the STC academic honor society.
Previously, Corder has served the Arkansas chapter as secretary and newsletter editor.
Patrick Moore, TreasurerPatrick Moore received degrees in Linguistics (B.A.), Comparative Literature (M.A.), and English (Ph.D.) from the University of Minnesota. He served in the U. S. Army from February 1968 to February 1970 when he was given an honorable discharge as a sergeant.
Moore was a technical writer for several corporations in the Minneapolis area from 1980 to 1986, where he wrote manuals documenting various hardware and software products. Since the fall of 1986, he has worked as an English professor at several universities, most recently at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where he teaches world literature, grammatical analysis, and history of the English language, and where he studies how cultural capitalists, tenured radicals, and totalizing rhetoricians dominate other workers.
Besides his many essays on William Carlos Williams, Gestalt Psychology, the Challenger Accident, and other subjects, Moore has published these three articles in the STC journal Technical Communication: (1) “When Persuasion Fails: Coping with Power Struggles.” Volume 46.3 (August 1999): 351-359. (2) “Rhetorical vs. Instrumental Approaches to Teaching Technical Communication.” Volume 44.2 (May 1997): 163- 173. (3) “From Wordsmith to Communication Strategist: Heresthetic and Political Maneuvering in Technical Communication,” coauthored with Melinda Kreth, Volume 52.3 (August 2005): 302-322.
This last essay received an award for Distinguished Technical Communication in the 2005 Frank R. Smith Outstanding Journal Article competition.
Moore has been president of the Arkansas chapter of the Society for Technical Communication four times, vice president vtwice, newsletter editor for three years, and treasurer more times than he can remember. He has received the STC’s Distinguished Chapter Service Award.
Please Note: Due to other obligations, the secretary elected for this year’s term has resigned. Stay tuned to the chapter e-mail list and Web site for information on a special election.
There is no question. Adobe PhotoShop is the industry standard for graphic professionals. But
at $600 a pop, it’s a bit pricey for technical writers who only on occasion need to use the software to edit or fine-tune a photo, or who use only a limited subset of the features. I’ve always enjoyed PhotoShop’s clear menu and tool bar functions, so when I’ve tried other photo programs, I’ve always found myself coming back (often to an earlier version that I had purchased long ago). I don’t pretend to know all the advanced PhotoShop features – don’t need to. So spending that kind of money for my limited usage was never cost-effective.
Fortunately, Adobe has taken the most useful features for low-to-medium-level users and packaged them as Photoshop Elements. In the past, this program was delivered free with other Adobe products, like Premiere, and offered only a few PhotoShop features. The latest versions of this software offer virtually every feature technical writers would need and more. And priced at under $100, you can’t beat the value.
PhotoShop Elements 3 and the most recently released version 4 offer all the standard editing tools you would expect in any photo program. You can crop and save to other formats. You have the ability to easily change the quality level if file size is an issue. You have a full range of options with tonal changes—simple adjustments like lighting/levels, and the more complex requiring a practiced eye like Shadows/Highlights or Adjust Hue/Saturation. Need to get rid of a person? That’s easy. Just use your Clone/Rubber Stamp tool to cover them with copies of the wall next to them. Presto. What person? (I also like to use this tool to slim up people or remove blemishes.)
With recent versions of Elements, Adobe folded in the Photo Album software they had been selling separately. This is a great product that allows you to easily organize your photos. You can automatically catalog every image on your hard drive, which helps you find “missing” photos that you know are on your hard drive “somewhere.” By adding “tags” (keywords) to your photos, you can search and find certain images at the click of a button – regardless
Reprinted from TechniScribe, the Orange County (CA) STC chapter’s newsletter.
of where they are on your computer. I’m currently using it to track the hundreds of photos I’ve taken at different times of a complex machine so I can pull out a smaller, focused selection when I need them.
Another feature I like a lot is the automatic downloading of my digital photos into the Elements photo organizer.All the images are automatically included in their organizer, ready for me to tag. And then it asks if I want to delete them off my memory card. Saves me time and effort—and I love it. (I know my camera has a program to do this—but I love it built into my photo editor.)
Other features of the program you may find useful include burning a dynamic slide show to CD or DVD and automatically creating a photo album that you can print. You can apply text effects and add frames around your pictures. You can build panoramic photos with their Photomerge function.
I was very happy with PhotoShop Elements 3 and I am basing my review on that version. Adobe has just released a new version – 4. My employer purchased it and I’m trying to determine if it’s worth the upgrade at home. It has a few new features, but nothing I can’t live without.
So if you’re looking for power and great photoediting features in a very inexpensive package– and something that stays in the Adobe and PhotoShop families, give PhotoShop Elements a try. You won’t be sorry.
Guy Ball has written on a variety of technology and multimedia topics for Intercom and various STC chapter newsletters. He works for EADSNorth America Defense as a senior technical writer. His next book, Images of America: Santa Ana, will be published by in Summer 2006. He can be reached at [email protected].
Hillbilly TechTalk is published for members and friends of the Arkansas Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. It serves as a communication link for members of the chapter.
Letters, comments, and articles are welcome. Articles must address topics of interest to technical communicators, especially those in Arkansas. Contact the editor for guidelines. Letters and articles may be edited to fit available space.
ReprintsYou may reprint original material appearing in
Technically Speaking as long as you acknowledge the source and send the editor a copy of the article.
DisclaimerThe opinions expressed by contributors to Technically Speaking are solely those of the individual writers and do not reflect the opinions of the Arkansas chapter or the STC. No guarantee is given that
the information provided is correct, complete, or up-to-date.
For more information about the Arkansas Chapter of STC, visit the web site at www.stc-arkansas.org.
Copyright “ 2006. The Arkansas Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA.
STC Region 5 Director Sherry Michaels 480.614.8440 [email protected]
EligibilityApplicants must have completed at least one year of post-secondary education.
» Applicants must be full-time students. » They may be either graduate students working toward a Master’s or Doctor’s degree, or undergraduate students working
toward a Bachelor’s degree. » Students should have at least one full year of academic work remaining to complete their degree programs, although under
exceptional circumstances an award may be granted to a student for the final half-year. » They should be studying communication of information about technical subjects. Other majors, such as general journalism,
electronic communication engineering, computer programming, creative writing, or entertainment, are not eligible.
AwardsAwards of $1,500 each will be granted toward school tuition and expenses. Two awards are granted to graduate students, and two to undergraduates.
ScheduleCompleted application forms must be received by February 15 of the year in which the scholarship is to be given.
Graduate students must notify the committee of acceptance in a graduate program by March 20. (Students enrolling in a graduate program may not know their status by February 16. They will be evaluated like accepted students, but their eligibility is contingent upon acceptance and notification by March 20.) Applicants will be notified by mail of committee decisions by April 15.
The Society for Technical Communication offers scholarships to assiststudents who are pursuing established degree programs in some area of technical communication.
