Call to Order, Introduction of Guests

• Phongphun Kijsanayothin (kphongph@yahoo.com), working on his PhD in computer science under Dr. Hewitt's direction.
• Karen Witemeyer's guests were her children, Wyatt, Peter, and Bethany. We noted Peter's 5 th birthday by singing. After presenting the winners of the contest, the Witemeyers went to meet the family patriarch at the airport.
• Kaylee Connor and sister Sharphira Fields visited. Sharphira is 14, trying to figure out how to get her book published.

Announcements and Business

March contest

• Pat Caps Mahaffey
• Lynn Davidson
• Barbara Rollins
• Mary Ann Smith
• Laura Thaxton
• Ruth Sellers -- First place for "A Texas Frontier Woman"
• Carolyn Dycus
• Ginny Greene
• Sharon Ellison
• Marie Averitt -- Honorable mention for "Little Bighorn of Elephant Mountain."
• Jan Carrington – 3rd for "A Texas Turkey Tale" and 2nd for "In the City of Brotherly Love"
Starting working now on your April entry on the topic "Making a Difference."

The Nominating Committee was named with Jan Carrington to chair and Mary Ann Smith to assist. They will talk to officers with expiring terms and others who might be interested. Jan will fly to Ohio next week where she'll be for several days. The Board meets in another couple of weeks. Elections present slate in April, the vote in May, and the new board takes seats in June.



Brags and sags



• Pat Capps Mehaffey had a copy of Cup Of Comfort For Weddings , finally published. Her two stories in it represent her presence in her third Cup of Comfort book. She also had a story accepted by The Upper Room for use in 2008. Her sag was she sent them four and they ignored the other three.
• Pat also offered a Sally Stewart book of Christian publishers, editors, authors for 2005 and two Christian magazines needing entries. Nancy Masters took the book for now, and offers it to the next claimant at the next meeting.
• Bill Neal showed his book Getting Away With Murder On The Texas Frontier, Sensational Killings And Murder Trials . He announced on April 17, at Abilene Public Library he'll be the featured speaker at the brown bag lunch. Nancy indicated his book is a finalist for Western Writers of America, a fact Bill didn't know, and that he will will be a summer program in July, on the topic Murder And Mayhem On The Prairies.
• Joan Upton Hall whose column appears in the Newsletter will be the speaker at the brown bag luncheon in May.
• Barbara Darnall brought husband Joe, a member.
• Lynn Davidson had Cowboy Magazine which published another of his stories. A young lady sent him an email, did illustration, will send. Cowboy Magazine is Published in Colorado by an editor who used to work for The Western Horseman magazine.
• Lynn also published the story of his life in a book Ramblin' Man , which starts a long time ago, comes up to just a little while ago. He figures he can resell to a lot to his friends and relatives who wonder what he said about them. He'll sell it to you for $12. It's print on demand and available on Amazon.com.
• Barbara Rollins noted member Carolyn Adams' presence despite a full life, fodder for future writing. Carolyn is moving to a new home (in Abilene ) by the end of March.
• Members@abilenewritersguild.org has been set up for notices to the membership, and Barbara asked for those who have not been receiving emails to let her know or correct a list of bouncing email addresses.
• Barbara's To Dingwall, Y'all manuscript has been returned from an overseas critique, and she'll follow up with unanswered questions.
• Barbara also won 1 st place in the Area Toastmasters preliminary for the International Speech contest.
• Cheryl Vorhaur got the experience to chase chickens when a child neighbor sought her help saying the chicken was chasing the child.
• Guest Sharphira Fields is working on a fiction book about teens. Asked if she was writing about what she knew she answered, "Yes ma'am." Nancy Masters suggested a vital part of publication is to get each publishers' guidelines and target the submission. Learn how to network with other writers and people who are interested.

Greeters Needed

Relative newcomer member Chuck Galgo acted as greeter. Jim Johnson followed with an appeal for others to man the post. The job involves getting folks to come in and help with greeting. Stand, smile, open door, hi, answer questions, tell where to go. See what we're all about. Handout. Left out front. "How greeting can benefit your writing." Open door and smile. Shake hands and get to know people. Answer questions they might have. Mingle afterwards, exchange information, know what you need to be doing. Build observation skills. Sell yourself with a 15 second elevator talk telling who you are, what you do, where you do it, and ask how you can meet later to continue dialogue.

Greeting is not opening and locking building, setting up and taking down chairs. It's just standing down at the front door, pulling the door shut at 7:15, and coming up for the meeting. There's a signup sheet for greeters on the table. Leave your name and phone number. We need at least 2 volunteers per month.

Nancy Masters told of standing in line at Houston convention center to get a hotdog, greeted man in front of her in shorts, who she thought didn't have money, thought he needed a loan for hot dogs at $4 each. She said, "Sir, I think the hot dogs and coke are going to cost about $5." He turned around and pulled out a wad of money and said, "If you don't have any money, I'll buy you a hotdog." He was the owner of Capstone Publishing, the second largest children's publishing company in the world. After standing in line 15 minutes Nancy walked out of convention center with a contract for her four WWII books.



Program

Dr. Rattikorn Hewett is a professor of computer science with Tech in Abilene doing one of most important jobs, research. As a computer scientist her job is to advance the science of computing, a lot different from programming. She is happy to have the opportunity to share what she's done over the years. She has to write and publish frequently and was anxious to share what she's learned about technical writing. She joked it's nothing that can beat the cowboy writing, but she would keep her presentation as light as possible and take questions at the end of the talk.



"Technical Writing, A Scientist's Perspective"

Why? Science & technology play important roles in our lives.

Communication about technical information is increasingly necessary.

Technical writing is an important skill for most technical professions.

Technical writers have an average salary of $44,000 to $95,000 per rear, $69,000 for Texas .


Technical writers are driven by the specific purpose of the piece:

• Publicize quickly news articles
• Inspire/outreach magazine columns/websites
• Use of technology technical documents
• Educate books
• Research venture/endeavor research proposals, patents
• Contribute new knowledge refereed publications.

Technicality levels vary from low to high. Impact of relationship, generality of purposes and reader population sizes. Higher technicality lever corresponds with low readership.


She showed a sample of a refereed technical paper, "Analysis of Mutations in the Colia1 Gene with Second-order Rule Induction"


Research for magazine articles may just mean information gathering. For journal articles, research means discover and invent something new, scientific contribution. Lots of thinking.

Review for magazine means on interestingness and styles by editors.

Review for journal articles reviewed on validity & significance by experts.

Readers: magazines, anyone

Technical papers, experts in the field.

Percentage of writing time, popular magazine, 40-90%

Technical paper, 5% majority of time spent on research and creating.

Magazine: days
Journals: weeks

Period from submission to publication, magazine weeks to months, journal articles months to years

Writing constraints – Magazine - time. Journal - space.

Characteristics: technical papers have
• Substance. Contents matter and come before style
• Convey accurate information. Accurately perceived and transferred.
Required Skills
• Accurate Perception Of Information. (read from reliable sources, pay attention to technical terms and meanings.—interview experts. Use tape recorders to record precisely. Even if you have knowledge. Once she was interviewed by PhD in neurobiologist, wants to be technical writer. Interviewed Hewitt, should be able to capture, but because in different fields, feedback, back and forth 3 or 4 times before she got it right. Rephrase, feedback as close as you can to the owner of the knowledge. )
• Abstraction: avoid complex details. Concentrate on what, why and how. Cite references for more detailed explanations. Use analogies, examples, and pictures.
• Observe how you learn to understand. Replace leopard with compass, map route, etc to show where.
• "You've got to help me. I can't understand my own writing."
Accurate transfer of information.
• Remember how you learn. Treat yourself as a novice, from one novice to the other.
• from colleague: from my experience many technical documents in computer science are poorly written, difficult to understand and do not serve their purpose well. Particularly in computer manuals, etc. When we are students, we are usually writing to convince a teacher that we understand something that the teacher already knows and generally knows even better than we do. Writing for the public, we're writing for an audience that doesn't understand it, so many technical documents are difficult to understand and virtually useless. Information explains nothing so the expert can find nothing to disagree with. We don't want that kind of technical writer.
Observe mistakes and learn to write

•  Unambiguously : SEPARATE THE PRECIPITATE FROM THE LIQUID AND PUT IT IN A BEAKER. PUT THE LATTER IN THE BEAKER.
•  Precisely A VARIABLE OF TYPE INT HOLDS AN INTEGER VALUE. A variable of type int can hold any integer value between -2,147,483,648 and 2, 147,483,647, inclusive.
•  Concisely – the system displays the end result of each and every experiment. The system displays the result of each experiment.
Note, however:

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style. Matthew Arnold

• Styles are only the beginning. Writing well will give an "unfair advantage" to publish in top venues.
• Learn technical writing styles.
• Every technical article has a story. Tell why the story is worth reading – issues, new ideas, importance.
• Get readers hooked quickly, elevator sales pitch – paper abstract.
• Master flows of thoughts, coherence and organized writing. Lead sentence ties in with previous paragraph.
• Write to achieve reader comprehensibility. There are ways to communicate with everyone. __ for dummies.
• State results accurately. Don't over/under claim.
• Expect no previous knowledge. Article must be self-contained. Define all terms before using them.
• Put yourself in place of the reader who may not take time to understand.
• Give enough context. Write for readers, not for yourself
• Less is more. Take more time to write less.
• Maximize clarity. Avoid using cluttered writing, use figures.
• We've shown that the recent unexplained behavior is different than the previous unexplained behavior. (cartoon)
• Simplicity, clarity, & coherence.
• Avoid unnecessary jargon "the washed-up brownshoe, after a long day of waging a lonely war against the forced of evil, opened the door with a sigh of relief, only to be met by his old lady."
• Coming home from work, the weary detective opened the door and greeted his wife.
• The fighting was heavy. (too vague/abstract and lacks details)
• After the mortar attack, the 31 st infantry broke through the camp perimeter and flattened the yard with machine-gun fire.
• Revise, revise, and revise. Hard to get writing right the first time.
Final remarks:
• Good technical writing takes time. Start early
• The higher level of technicality, the longer it takes to produce the article
• The larger the gap between the level of technicality of the article and that of the reader, the more challenging it is to write.
• A good technical writer must be a good learner and a responsible and creative teacher.
• Two simple rules: learn and observe how to learn/write for readers who (are assumed to) know less.

Refreshments

We adjourned to refreshments furnished by Gail McMillan, Sue Davis, and Brandon Davis.

Respectfully Submitted,



Barbara B. Rollins for Sharon Ellison



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