Announcing the Tech Comm Nightmares Before Christmas Contest!

image © Disney, Touchstone Pictures

By Mellissa Ruryk

Cue the spooky music…

STC’s 2020 Most Improved Community—Instructional Design & Learning SIG—is holding a fun social event and contest open to all STC members.

Contest details

To enter the contest, write a short (500 word) description of your worst nightmare connected to your work as a technical communicator, that actually happened to you. Names can be changed to protect the guilty!

Were you teaching a class with your fly open? Burst a button on your blouse revealing your bra? Wardrobe malfunctions aside, how about missing a typo in the company name on the front page of the new brochure, printed on the most expensive paper ever? How about printing 100s of a new SOP with the approving VP’s name misspelled?

Practitioners, bring us your worst technical communication disasters. Your pain can be your gain! STC student members will judge the entries and award 3 prizes.

Send your contest entries to StudentOutreach@stcidlsig.org before November 30, 2021.

Judging

Judging criteria will be along the lines of:

How many people saw the mistake?
What was the dollar cost and/or number of hours to recover from the nightmare?
How long did you work on the project without clueing into the nightmare?

Announcing the Winners

On Fri, December 3, 2021, from 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM EST at the IDL’s First Fridays @ Five Zoom social, we’ll announce the winners and ask the authors to read their entry to us. All entries will also be published in the Q4 issue of our award-winning IDeaL newsletter (publication date: December 31, 2021).