InfoPlus May 2025

ISTC News
ISTC Community
A bit of AI … poking and prodding
Upcoming events
Training courses
About InfoPlus
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ISTC News

UK Technical Communication Awards

Entries are now open for 2025 through the ISTC website. Please check here for details. Then fill out the entry form to nominate yourself, your team or someone else. If you need any help with your online submission, contact us at istc@istc.org.uk.

We are keeping the established guidelines. The Awards are open to any individual or team, whether employed, self-employed, contracting, volunteering, permanent, temporary, full-time, or part-time. We continue to encourage entries of all types, from traditional documentation to those demonstrating technical innovation and look forward to receiving yours.

Building a Better Member Experience: Updates and Opportunities

Our volunteer website team continues to make strong progress. This month, we wanted to share a few highlights from our ongoing work:

As part of our research into content design and strategy, we’ve been exploring the Diátaxis model. This approach offers a clear framework for structuring technical content based on user needs and can be a valuable resource for technical communicators. You can find out more here: https://diataxis.fr/.
We’re developing persona-based scenarios and user stories to guide the website’s requirements. To structure our approach, we’re using Jesse James Garrett’s Elements of User Experience model. This ensures that every design decision is anchored in a clear understanding of user needs and behaviours. If you would like an overview, there’s a short introductory video here: Interaction Design Foundation.
We’re continuing the work to improve the searchability of Communicator back issues. A clarification from last month: this project is still ongoing; our aim is to make it much easier for members to find useful articles and resources from previous editions. Currently all pages covering 2004-2011 have been updated.
We are working to increase awareness of the many benefits included with ISTC membership, and to make them easier to access. One development, previously mentioned but worth highlighting again, is the Member Portal. After logging into the website, members are automatically taken to this page, which provides direct links to key resources, including the latest issues of our publications and the archives. The portal can also be found at any time under Membership > Member Portal.
We would love to hear your feedback on the portal; please get in touch via istc@istc.org.uk.

Finally, ISTC members are warmly invited to join the website team. It’s a great way to socialise with peers, build complementary skills in areas such as project management, UX design, and collaborative working, and strengthen your professional portfolio, CV, or CPD record.

If you are interested in getting involved, please contact istc@istc.org.uk.

IJTC Update

We have been preparing the website for a large selection of articles that were written by Jean Rollinson over a decade ago, but their contents are still relevant to technical communicators today.

The first one ‘The Right Words‘ is available now and this is a compilation of four original articles spread over multiple issues of Communicator, and now available 18 years later (but still valid) on IJTC.

I will be working with Jean to get many more her of articles onto IJTC for all visitors to the website over the next month or two. There will also be more articles from CJ Walker at Firehead too.

Because of all the background preparations for the above articles, there haven’t been any articles to send out a newsletter about. But that will be rectified by the next newsletter planned for May 2025.

If you have anything that you would like to publish then get in touch with me via the editor@ijtc.net address.

Advertise in InfoPlus

Get your company or products noticed in the TechComms community! We are offering new opportunities for advertising in our monthly InfoPlus newsletter.

These adverts are banners to be positioned as you choose. Placement examples are included in this PDF, which also contains all the necessary steps and costs involved to place an advert in future editions of InfoPlus.

If you would like to advertise with us please contact Chantel Sankey – istc@istc.org.uk.

ISTC Community

Become more involved in the professional community through the ISTC Area Groups, join us online at one of our monthly ISTC Meets events, and find us on social media (links below). Members (once logged in) also have access to the ISTC Discussion Forums.

Area Groups

If you wish to start your own Area Group, contact istc@istc.org.uk.

Eastern England Group

This is a new group for the Eastern England area and it’s being run by Andy Smith. The second meeting will be on Tuesday 13th May

Email Andy on easternengland@istc.org.uk for a meeting link.

The Eastern England group are online only, meeting on Zoom.

There is no agenda nor speakers and the group is currently working out what sort of group to be. Come along and you can help steer them in the right direction. They’ve already taken input from their first meeting and changed from Thursdays to Tuesdays.

They meet on the second Tuesday of the month, from 7:30 to 8:10p.m.

Geographically, they cover the east of England from East Anglia to Northumberland but welcome people from far and wide. Members and non-members of the ISTC are welcome.

Thames Valley Area Group

The Thames Valley local group meeting is at the Bird-in-Hand pub in Knowle Hill, RG10 9UP on the first Tuesday of each month from 7.30pm. All are welcome.

They rarely have a set subject but the conversation always has a strong tech comms flavour. Maybe something from recent news, something that has happened at work, or some new technology to discuss.

London Area Group

The next London Area Group meetup is Wednesday 21st May. This meeting is in person and further details will be posted in the WhatsApp chat for the group nearer the time.

ISTC Meets

ISTC Meets is our monthly series of live online presentations and discussions from industry experts across the Technical Communication spectrum.

May’s ISTC Meets features Sandy Markle with their talk “Empowering teams: Why every department should own its knowledge documentation. In this session, I’ll talk about the importance of advocating the message that every department in your organization owns and actively manages its knowledge documentation, even if you’re not directly part of that department. As technical writers, setting your company up for success means not only creating and maintaining technical documents but also empowering departments to manage their own knowledge.”

It is scheduled for May 16th 2025 and it starts at 15:30.

To register for this ISTC Meets, please click this Zoom link.

If you contact ISTC directly, istc@istc.org.uk, you can be added to the ISTC Meets mailing list.

If there are people out there willing to give a 30 minute or so talk on their aspects of tech comms (via Zoom), please get in touch with ISTC Meets.

For full details of all of our previous speakers, and for all future ISTC Meets, please visit our website.

Social Media

Community Forums

The forums are available to all members once you have logged into the ISTC website.

A Request for Back Issues

In ISTC Towers we’ve recently been looking at all of our back issues of our magazine, Communicator – or The Communicator, as it was originally called. Currently we are missing a few scans of our older issues and we’d like to find these gap fillers.

To save repeating this list in every issue of InfoPlus going forward, we’ve added the list of missing issues to the Communicator Archive page.

A bit of AI … poking and prodding.

There’s a court case going on in the USA where hundreds of authors are suing Meta for copyright infringement.

Meta “allegedly” stole approximately (aka they’ve been caught with their hands deep in the cookie jar!) some 80 Terrabytes of eBooks (via torrents) from a well known eBook piracy website in order to help to train Llama, their LLM system.

One of the defensive arguments that they’ve used was along the lines of “fair use of copyrighted materials is vital to this”.

Other journalists working on the case have gone as far as asking Llama if piracy is OK. To which it replied: “Using pirated books to train AI is not okay,” it admonished. “In fact, it’s a serious violation of copyright laws and can have significant consequences for authors and publishers.”.

There is a podcast on The Guardian’s website entitled ‘The authors taking on Mark Zuckerberg’. It goes into much more detail about the background to the case and where it’s at now.

Meanwhile, the case continues.

Upcoming Events

There are multiple in-person and/or online-only conferences coming up in May. All of their details are below:

Title: Write The Docs, Portland
Date: May 4th-6th, 2025
Online/In-Person: In-Person in Portland, Oregon
Website: https://www.writethedocs.org/conf/portland/2025/

Write the Docs is a well known global event and community for software documentation professionals, including programmers, technical writers, customer support, designers, project managers, and more.

With hundreds of documentarians from around the world, this conference offers conferences, networking opportunities, open-source projects, and lightning talks all about the art and science of documentation.

Title: Elevate by Trados
Date: May 6th-8th, 2025
Online: Online. Register via link below.
Website: https://www.trados.com/events/elevate/

About:
ELEVATE is the localization industry’s largest online event, bringing together translation professionals and academics from around the world to:

Discuss key industry trends, including the rise of AI
Learn about the latest product innovations and
Explore technical topics with RWS experts.

This year’s ELEVATE will include our annual RWS Campus event, making it our biggest conference yet! Over three days, ELEVATE will provide valuable insights and connections for everyone in the translation industry – from students starting their localization journey to seasoned experts.

Title: tcworld China 2025
Date: May 22nd-23rd, 2025
Online/In-Person: In-Person in Shanghai, China.
Website: https://www.tcworld-china.cn/en/

About:
Key Topics for tcworld China 2025:

Technical Authoring
AI in Technical Communication
International Standards
Information Design and information Development
UX
Software Documentation
Globalisation/Localisation/Terminology
Content Marketing
Education and Career Development
Content Management and Delivery

Training Courses

Accredited courses have been reviewed by a professional panel of experienced ISTC members. A course listed as “ISTC Accredited” means that the panel believes the course meets its stated objectives and is suitable for its intended audience.

Course providers have to apply for renewal of accreditation every 2 years, which helps to ensure the courses reflect current best practice.

Armada

The Armada course (run over 5 days) is available either online or via an in-person classroom-based course. The next dates are:

Reading: Classroom-based & Online – 16th – 20th June 2025

There are also classes available at their Birmingham / Bromsgrove, Cardiff, Manchester, Milton Keynes, Nottingham and Sheffield Training Centres. These would need to be arranged upon request.

For further details, see www.armada.co.uk/course/tatp.

Cherryleaf

The Cherryleaf courses are available online and can be booked for single tech comms people or as a group.

Technical Writer – Induction Course: https://cherryleaf.teachable.com/p/technical-writer-induction-course

Using Generative AI in Technical Writing: https://cherryleaf.teachable.com/p/using-generative-ai

ESTON Technical/Commercial Authorship

This course run by ESTON is online-only and is available any time.

Technical/Commercial Authorship Diploma Course ‐ Parts 1 & 2 (EDL2D)

ESTON Simplified English Part 3 (EDL8T)

A discount is offered to ISTC members.

TCTrainNet – tekom Certificate training in Technical Communication

There are two accredited courses available from TCTrain and the dates in 2025 when they are run are:

TCTrain Professional course for beginners and career changers:

June 23rd 2025
September 29th 2025
November 24th 2025

TCTrainNet Professional

TCTrain Expert course for experienced technical writers:

October 20th 2025

TCTrainNet Expert

For ISTC members, TCTrainNet offer a discount of 200 Euros too.

Firehead

Firehead offer a number of accredited courses. They are supplied in a format of videos, PDFs, eBooks and assessments.

Please note that attending an ISTC Accredited course from the trainers above does not automatically make you an ISTC Member. You will still need to apply for ISTC membership afterwards. If the training course has whet your whistle, then come and join us.

About InfoPlus

InfoPlus is your go-to source for staying informed about our profession, featuring news not only from the ISTC but also from across the technical communication community.

This complimentary newsletter is emailed to approximately 1500 individuals.

Subscribe to InfoPlus here, you can unsubscribe at any time from within the email sent out each month.

For advertising enquiries, contact istc@istc.org.uk.

Submitting content

If you have noteworthy information to share with your peers, please send it my way at newsletter.editor@istc.org.uk. We want to ensure that your news reaches as many people as possible.

Published and distributed on the first working day of each month, InfoPlus occasionally experiences slight delays until the first week of the month. Keep this in mind when submitting time-sensitive information.

Please get the information for the June 2025 edition to newsletter.editor@istc.org.uk by Monday 19th May 2025.

About our publishers

InfoPlus, the Monthly Newsletter from the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators (ISTC), is a valuable resource for the largest UK body representing scientific and technical communicators. Whether you are involved in technical writing, technical illustration, or other forms of communicating technical information, ISTC is the professional association dedicated to supporting your career.

Explore the benefits of ISTC membership and find out how to join.

Back Page

Thanks to Edward for sending in some more puns to help me put something in this area after a few months of nothing whatsoever.

What do you get if you cross a Philosopher, Obesity, and a Man of God? A Deep Fat Fryer!

What do you get if you cross a Vampire with an Antelope? Vlad the Impala

Did you hear about the contortionist who wished they could think outside the box?

I applied for a job as a high wire performer, but after a few weeks waiting to hear back, I gave up as the suspense was killing me!

I became aware the other day of this thing called Anger: I hear it’s all the rage!

I stand behind my TV so I can learn how to face setbacks

I took a chef’s assistant job at a greasy spoon: the pay was terrible, but I stuck at it as I wanted to see how it would pan out.

I was offered a job as a Video Assistant Referee, but turned it down as I have to draw the line somewhere.

I once went out with a lifeguard. She kept saying I shouldn’t swim in the ocean: that was a red flag for me.

I’ve started dating a Rounders player. We get on alright, though I doubt we’ll get past first base.

If a skydiver is made redundant, do they get parachute payments?

I met a very muscular mathematician the other day. I said, “Do you work out?” The mathematician replied, “No, I use a calculator”.

I have been seeing the same dentist since I was a toddler – she still gives me a sticker: I don’t have the heart to tell her that I’m nearly 50….

My local Rugby Club was offered a £5,000 donation, but on condition they ‘pay it forward’. They refused, as they could only pay it back.

If you have something else, be it funny or a puzzle, or even if it’s more puns, you can send them to newsletter.editor@istc.org.uk by Monday 19th May 2025.

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