[163] in Humor
HUMOR: National Technical Writers' Week
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (abennett@MIT.EDU)
Sat Apr 2 07:20:53 1994
From: abennett@MIT.EDU
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Sat, 02 Apr 94 07:19:35 EST
Date: Thu, 31 Mar 94 17:59:35 PST
From: ckleinja@Novell.COM (Connie Kleinjans)
Subject: HUMOR: National Technical Writers' Week
PRESS RELEASE
Nation to Celebrate National Technical Writer's Week
Next week, March 28 through April 1, 1994, the nation celebrates the
contributions of technical writers to their quality of life by
observing National Technical Writers' Week. This event honors the hard
work of the women and men who battle daily to protect normal people
from the frustration of unusable products. Their work has saved the
sanity of people struggling to make a product work by guessing what it
does. Ultimately, these victims have been forced to turn to the
technical manual, where they have found support and assistance. Or the
phone number of the company's response center.
Parades are scheduled in major cities across the nation:
MONDAY's parade in Chicago features a salute to the Chicago Manual of
Style, for decades a standard of editorial correctness. Special
recognition will go to the use of angle brackets to symbolize keycaps.
Attendees will be given a chance to win a drawing for tee shirts and
caps showing a graphic of the keycap <ANY> and a hammer.
TUESDAY's parade in New York will be punctuated with performance art
depicting a passion play of common events in a tech writers' life:
o Janice Connally will perform a rendition of "You want a 100-page
manual in three weeks!?!"
o Mike Corcoran will express the heart-rending, "What do you mean you
changed the GUI interface!?!"
o Margaret Jamison-Long will share the impassioned, "You mean my
software wasn't up to date? Are you saying I'll have to redo ALL
my screen dumps!?!"
WEDNESDAY's parade in Boston will feature technical writers marching in
formation carrying manuscripts and red pens. An adjunct marching band
will perform a salute to the daisy wheel printer, in which band members
in teeshirts will show how to create graphics using only ASCII
characters. A smaller team will circulate through the crowd creating
smilies. :-)
In an evening symposium, an MIT scientist will give a presentation
on how to program a VCR, with simultaneous translation by a VCR
specialist technical writer.
THURSDAY's parade in San Francisco will feature participation from
technical writers in the famed Silicon Valley. At the parade's end
at Moscone Center, displays will show historic tech writer tasks:
o Creating combined text and graphics using paper, pens, and tape.
o Automatically generating an index by sending the document to a
contractor.
o Technical manuals normally overlooked, such as signs saying
WALK/DON'T WALK, "Please wait for host/hostess to be seated," and
"Do not exit. Door is alarmed."
FRIDAY's parade in Washington D.C. will culminate in a speech by
the League of Legal Writers on "The Legal Ramifications of Special
Text: When to Use Note, Important, Warning, and Danger."
The following people will be recognized for their special
contributions to the art and science of technical writing:
o Elizabeth M. Gribbons, inventor of the breakthrough "Hit any key to
continue."
o Evelyn Whartonfield, who stunned the world with "This page left
intentionally blank."
o Robert Hanford, who, in a dark moment of blind inspiration, developed
the acronym, RTFM.
You, too, can participate in National Technical Writers' week:
just take a tech writer to lunch. For an especially festive treat,
choose a restaurant with a badly edited menu, and enjoy the writer's
paroxysms of correctness.
Copyright (c) 1994 Connie Kleinjans
