Contents
- ISTC News
- ISTC Community
- A bit of AI … poking and prodding
- Upcoming events
- Training courses
- About InfoPlus
- Back Page
ISTC News
TCUK25 news and results
UKTC Award winners for 2025
The winners were announced as part of our TCUK conference Celebration Dinner on Monday 24 November 2025.
The awards were given to: One Overall Winner, and Three Merit Award Winners
The entries were to a high standard with contributions from individuals, small companies and large organisations from several countries.
For more in-depth details of the entries and the judges’ comments, see the notes from the Awards ceremony on the ISTC website: 2025 Award Winners page.
Overall Winner (Trophy Winner)
Ulrica Cheng, Jane Chang
IBM COBOL Upgrade Advisor for z/OS and supporting content.
Merit Award Winners
Merit Award Winner
Rachel Potts and 3di Information Solutions Ltd
Content operations implementation diagrams.
Merit Award Winner
ROCKWOOL Core Solutions, Definition, Dr Marco Imperadori
Building with stone wool insulated sandwich panels
Merit Award Winner
Tejas Jare and Annette Sohor
IBM Envizi Supply Chain Intelligence Documentation
Vote for your favourite Communicator article
The time has come again for you to vote in our beloved Communicator contest! Voting closes on December 30th, 2025.
ISTC Office December Opening Hours
The ISTC office will close for the Christmas break at 5pm on Monday 22nd December and will re-open at 9am on Monday 5th January.
We’d like to thank you for your support during 2025 and wish you a happy and peaceful Christmas.
The next issue of InfoPlus will be sent out on Monday 5th January 2026.
ISTC Membership Renewals for 2026
ISTC Membership Renewals for 2026
Renewals for ISTC members opened today and payment can be made via the website or by contacting the ISTC office (istc@istc.org.uk). Payment is due by 31st January.
Members will receive an email with details and can check the renewals page of the ISTC website.
Member benefits include:
- Access to the entire Communicator archive online (from 2004 onwards).
- Access to the IJTC, an online journal published in collaboration with our partners.
- Entitlement to use letters MISTC or FISTC after your name (subject to experience)
- Access to members-only discussion lists, including job postings
- Access to online resources
- Membership discounts to special industry-relevant events, training and conferences
- Involvement in the biggest organisation representing technical communicators in the UK
Website Volunteer Team update
Here’s an overview of what the Website Team have been working on during November.
TCUK
November being the month of the conference, the TCUK website pages took priority over other website changes. Our volunteers used the available three weeks in November to add final updates to the TCUK web pages. We created surveys for delegates to give feedback about their experience of conference activities, and added items to the timetable as and when slots were confirmed. Content on the TCUK pages was improved in terms of language and layout.
Website Updates
The team finalised changes to existing pages on the ISTC website to make ISTC membership benefits and options clearer to individuals and businesses. The history of the ISTC and how the organisation governs itself received updates too, with an improved structure and collation of disparate details.
Best Practices
Every month the team meetings always surface topics related to the practice of technical communication. Recurring themes we discussed this month included plain language and medical communication.
Looking Ahead
With TCUK taking priority this month, the website volunteers agreed that the ISTC website strategy audit review would be revisited in December and in the new year. The audit that we conducted over the autumn months is ready for analysis. And out of that analysis we will draw out an actionable plan for site-wide updates in the months ahead.
Communicator Indexes and Glossary
After diligently refactoring the process we use to produce the Indexes for every issue of Communicator, we are approaching the finish line! The last step is to incorporate content from the Winter issue when it’s published. Another useful section of the ISTC website is the glossary page, which we’ve updated in part (further updates will be made each month) and you can once more access it on the website.
Another useful area of the website is our Resources page. To help us identify what kind of updates would give our readers and members the most value, we’ll post a request on our Slack channel in early 2026.
Want to lend a hand?
If you’d like to help the ISTC improve its website and collaborate with other ISTC members in the process, send an email to istc@istc.org.uk. We’re a friendly team and there’s no pressure to volunteer a particular number of hours – you can help out as and when your availability allows.
IJTC Update
Due to the amount of work on-going in the UK side due to TCUK25, there wasn’t enough time to create a newsletter for November, but we will definitely be sending one out in mid-December with information from all three institutes included.
We want your articles!
There aren’t many rules for sending in your articles:
- it doesn’t have to be of an epic length.
- there’s nothing stopping you from sending in multiple small articles for a series, along the lines of our series from Jean Rollinson and CJ Walker.
- it has to be relevant to the technical communicators who are part of the ISTC – as well as our Australian and New Zealand colleagues.
- it must not be generated using AI. You can, however, write about AI tools used within the tech comms field.
Take a look at the other articles that are already on the website and see if your subject would fit in and send it 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.
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.
ISTC Slack now available
The details of where to find our Slack channel can be found in the email sent to all ISTC members on September 17th, with the title ‘A problem shared is a problem halved’.
Before joining please remember:
This is a professional space, and all areas, including any private messages, may be reviewed by the ISTC and are subject to the ISTC’s Code of Conduct.
We look forward to seeing you in there.
Area Groups
If you wish to start your own Area Group, contact istc@istc.org.uk.
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 17th December. This meeting is online and the meeting invite will be posted in the WhatsApp chat for the group nearer the time. We are hoping that the January meeting will be an in-person one.
ISTC Meets
ISTC Meets is our monthly series of live online presentations and discussions from industry experts across the Technical Communication spectrum.
For full details of all of our previous speakers, and for all future ISTC Meets, please visit our website.
Our December ISTC Meets is on the 12th December at 13.00 with Gareth Brinn who will be discussing content strategy.
Here’s the Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/SVQ9zd-eTq28qufjwR4loQ
Mailing list
If you contact ISTC directly, istc@istc.org.uk, you can be added to the ISTC Meets mailing list.
Talking Heads wanted!
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.
Social Media
We recently pared back our social media areas to make them easier to manage and post to. Our FB pages for ISTC and TCUK will remain for the time being whilst they are archived, then they will be removed permanently. This will be followed by the ISTC Community (Facebook group) which will be archived and removed before the end of the year.
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.
News
- After a court case where Warner Brothers sued AI music platform Suno for allowing end users to create AI-soundalikes of their artists, WB have now partnered with their former “enemy” to train on licensed recordings and let users create songs with participating artists’ voices and styles.
- Within the last week, there were three major model releases:
- Claude Opus 4.5 from Anthropic
- Gemini 3 from Google
- GPT-5.1 Pro from OpenAI
The game is certainly afoot!
AI at TCUK25
I first attended Warren Singer’s talk on creating a chatbot using the CustomGPT.ai website. Once we signed up (for a 7 day free trial – remember to cancel it otherwise it could get expensive) we trained it on the ISTC’s website. Warren also added some copies of Communicator which expanded the range of source assets it would research into. Quite quickly, those of us who attended, were able to get our own mini ChatBot up and running and able to answer our questions about the ISTC.
The other AI workshop I went to was Ellis Pratt’s guide to using Google Labs’ Flow. There was also Google’s announcement that their Nano Banana 3 was now available and I had a quick play with that too.
Many, many years ago, back when InfoPlus was only available in PDF format, I submitted a quick tip on how to remove the password from a PDF using Chrome. Surprisingly, this trick still works today. You open the password-protected PDF file and “re-print” it, then save it as a new file and Chrome removes the password.
Note that this will only remove a standard password from a PDF by using Chrome. It cannot remove any kind of ‘permission password’. For those, you will need to hire someone with a data centre and lots of machines all running professional PDF decryption suites.
Whilst I was sat in Ellis’ guide to Google Flow, I decided to create a simple video of the same guide. Google Flow’s free account gives you 180 credits to use on video generation. Each video is 8 seconds in length and, when generated at the lowest quality, costs you 20 of these credits.
You can buy more credits to use in Google Flow via a subscription for one of the Google AI subscription plans. These range from a limited number of credits per month (but more than the initial free 180 credits), right up to high-volume levels via their ‘Ultra’ plans.
There’s nothing stopping you using all of your credits towards multiple videos and stitching them together, but some planning is needed so that you don’t waste 20 credits here or there on ‘rough cuts’.
Anyway, I digress, here’s the 8 second video I created at TCUK25. It’s has been hosted in a dark and dingy area (to match the subject of the video) of the ISTC YouTube channel.
My 8-second video on removing a password from a PDF file via Chrome.
Whilst writing the above, I also created the same tip but using a comic book style using Google’s Nano Banana… or Neon Bandana as I nearly called it 🙂
And that’s it for this year’s columns on all things on AI. We’ll be back with even more AI chatter and news in 2026!
Upcoming Events
December is the time of the year when expos and conferences tend to be replaced with work Xmas parties. This section will return in the January or February issue when there are fresh events to report on.
I’ve been supplied a few already, but I’m saving them for when I’m able to do a bit of a rework to how this section appears in future issues.
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 is run over 5 days. You can attend in-person at our dedicated training facilities at Bristol, Bromsgrove, Manchester or Reading, or participate live online.
The next course dates are:
- Reading: Classroom-based & Online – 8th December – 12th December 2025
- Manchester: Classroom-based – 12th March – 13th March 2026
- Birmingham/Bromsgrove: Classroom-based – 4th – 5th June 2026
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:
- January 26th, 2026
- April 2026
TCTrain Expert course for experienced technical writers:
- April 20th, 2026
- October 12th, 2026
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.
- DITA Concepts
- Make Search Better: An Introduction to Keywording
- Structuring Prompts for Technical Communicators and Content Developers
- Presenting in English with Equal Impact
- Content Strategy Overview
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.
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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 January 2026 edition to newsletter.editor@istc.org.uk by 15th December 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
Continuing with last month’s “new” section, here are a selection of other mishaps in the tech comms field as supplied (anonymously) by our members.
I talked to (or maybe harrangued is the more appropriate term) a few of my fellow technical communicators at TCUK25 and I’ve received some examples of “Ooops!” from their careers.
For this issue, I refer you a “bun washer”. Nope, not a bum washer, as that’s a bidet, but this one was specifically for buns by all accounts!
The history for this error goes back 20 or so years when blueprints were manually typed up by someone who didn’t know how to read them correctly. They saw “6un washer” and typed (on a typewriter) “bun washer” instead. And bun washer is how it was referred to by all the engineers from that time onwards – until our devoted tech comms expert dug around to find out why.
Can you do any better, with much worse examples?
If so, you can send them to newsletter.editor@istc.org.uk, or send me a message via the ISTC Slack channel, by 15th December 2025.