Re: Hostility towards STC

[Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net>]

Hi again, folks. I sort of started a subthread here about creating a 
TWBOK and using that as the basis for certification; then I left town 
for a couple of days. Time to jump back in.

In response to the Keith/Bruce exchange snipped below, I would 
specifically avoid including specific tool knowledge (I think I said 
that already). You should probably know something about the role of 
style guides in a tech writing organization, but that doesn't mean you 
have to have memorized my favorite style guide. I think it is useful to 
know the difference between a raster image and a vector diagram. But 
that does not mean you have to be a proficient user of Photoshop and 
Adobe Illustrator. You should know the capabilities and limitations of 
wysiwyg HTML editors; but that does not mean you have to be experienced 
with (pick one) FrontPage or Dreamweaver. You should be able to carry on 
an intelligent discussion about the way personality type affects the 
relationships between SMEs and writers; but that doesn't mean you have 
to have completed a Myers-Briggs training course.

In other words, there are fundamentals you ought to be familiar with in 
a variety of areas--that's the TWBOK concept. With respect to 
certification, perhaps you ought to be able to demonstrate proficiency 
in some number of those areas (someone said something about a quorum 
standard, or something like that). Maybe you ought to show that you can 
master _some_ tools (but without specifying what tools those are).

My point is that we ought to be able to arrive at a consensus on these 
broad questions before thinking about the details.

Dick

Bruce Byfield wrote: