Conference Competitions

 

 

There was a farmer who grew excellent quality wheat and every season he won the award for the best grown in his county. One year a reporter from the local newspaper interviewed the farmer and learned that each spring the man shared his wheat seed with his neighbors so that they too could plant it in their fields…

“How can you afford to share your best wheat seed with your neighbors when they are entering their crops in the competition with yours?” the reporter asked….

“Why that’s very simple,” the farmer explained… “The wind picks up pollen from the developing wheat and carries it from field to field. If my neighbors grow inferior wheat, cross-pollination will steadily degrade the quality of all the wheat, including mine. If I am to grow good wheat, I must help my neighbors grow good wheat”…

STC India organizes competitions every year. This year let’s make it about helping our neighbors so that everyone can benefit from better content – collectively.

That’s one of the ways to deep delight 🙂

To participate, you’d need to pair up with another participant from a different organization. In this day and age, we can assure you that it’s easy to find a willing participant. 

All you need to do is ask!

When: Your idea should be harvested and submitted for evaluation by the 31st of October 2020.
Send it to thomasnibu@aol.com and ab.techwriter@gmail.com.
Remember to Subject the email as STC Competition : <Round number>

What: Is the prize? A free entry to an awesome 2020 conference 🙂

Any tech writing written test (at least the good ones) has one section focused on your ability to detect errors. Now, these errors could be because of ignorance, carelessness, or just the plain old fat finger typo. You and your partner must create a passage with infused errors that an automated spell checkers cannot detect. Which means the word exists in the dictionary, but is used out of context and is thus hilariously wrong. We knew you’d ask for an example.

– To ass a schema to the warehouse…

The max word count for the passage is 700 words. The team that can squeeze the most words through without detection – wins!

And just to be clear, let’s also define a typo – it’s a result of mistyping a letter with something else that is immediately around a specific key on a standard keyboard.

We’ll also allow you to interchange the letters of a word (like from and form)

Sounds like a Hollywood flick? It could be!

We’ve always struggled (some of us) with proving our worth as tech writers. One of the reasons is being able to measure our work and showing tangible value. Our measurements aren’t as definite as it’s for sales – for example. So what measures have you put in place that can be pollinated in another organization. It could be at an individual (personal) or something that can be implemented in a team. We’ll give you a large canvas to play with. Which means your measurements don’t just have to be about performance, it could be content efficacy, quality, cost, savings, process improvements, tool-related, etc.  

The criteria to win is impact and practicality.

You guessed it – videos. Create a 2-minute video with your partner(s) and explain an everyday task that people often get wrong. The criteria to win will be ingenuity, clarity, structure. You should be comfortable uploading this on social media.

Not a video person? You are welcome to submit an infographic. Think you can charm us with just the magic of words? 

Hmm… we like your confidence 🙂 

We did think about running a competition for the best competition idea too! And if you have one – do let us know. That could be round four 🙂