STC's Golden Anniversary

Boston: A Cradle of Liberty...and Technical Information

By Marguerite Krupp

I have a T-shirt that says, "It took me 50Years to look this good!" Much the same can be said of the STC, though it has proven very difficult to drive a stake into the ground and say, exactly, what the STC's official birth date ought to be.

When the STC@50 committee began to research the beginnings of the STC, we were surprised to find that nobody really knows which (and where) the first professional society in the U.S. devoted exclusively to the needs of career technical communicators originated (although several contenders exist). An excellent article in the July/August 2002 issue of Intercom talks about the Society's first members. That article makes it sound as though the Association of Technical Writers and Editors (TWE), founded in 1953, was the first technical communication society, but actually, there was a frenzy of activity about that time.

Why Do You Care?

Boston has a number of significant firsts to its credit, and technical communication was no exception. The road that led to our Distinguished Chapter Achievement Award started early.

On October 7, 1953, a group of technical writers and editors in Boston met at MIT and founded the Society of Technical Writers (STW), a precursor of the STC. Research performed by STC Senior Member Dr. Anne Ladd in the Boston Chapter archives shows that the STW held its first meeting on October 7, 1953, about a month before the TWE meetings noted in Intercom. Fifty members attended.¹ A few facts concerning the early days:

• The first bylaws were approved on November 24, 1953. Membership was $7.50 per year.
• The first STW president was Floyd Hickok.
• The first STW chapters included Boston, Edgewood, Fort Wayne, Mohawk, New York, Niagara Frontier, and Winston-Salem.

In the mid-1950s, the formation of technical communication societies must have been an idea whose time had come. According to STC Fellow Ron Bliq, the honor of forming the first such society belongs to Great Britain. The Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators (ISTC) was inaugurated in 1948.²

Timeline-and Who's Who

Once technical communication professionals began to realize the benefits of coming together, further combinations seemed inevitable, as did the penchant for creating unpronounceable initialisms. Here's a short synopsis, courtesy of Ron Bliq and our own Chapter archives.

• 1953—The Society of Technical Writers (STW) and the Association of Technical Writers and Editors (TWE) were established.
• 1954—The Technical Publishing Society (TPS) was founded on the west coast.
• 1956—The Professional Group on Engineering Writing and Speech (PGEWS) came into being as one of about 25 special interest groups within the overall framework of the Institute of Electrical Engineers. Shortly afterward, the parent group changed its name to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the PGEWS became the IEEE Professional Communication Society (PCS). While this group shares many goals (and members) with STC, PCS focuses on helping IEEE engineers, scientists, and computer specialists become better communicators. STC primarily serves the needs of career technical communicators.
• 1957—STW and TWE, the two East Coast societies, combined into the Society of Technical Writers and Editors (STWE).
• 1960—TPS joined with STWE to form the Society of Technical Writers and Publishers (STWP).
• 1970—The STWP Board of Directors, meeting in Pittsburgh from October 8-10, 1970, voted to change the society's name to the Society for Technical Communication (STC), effective July 1, 1971.³

Technical Communication Societies

Although the STC is now the largest technical communication society in the world, it is by no means the only one. The ISTC is still flourishing in Great Britain, and many other technical communication societies have formed in various countries. Many of these individual societies, including STC and ISTG, also belong to the International Council for Technical Communication (INTECOM), which was formed in the early 1970s. INTECOM holds conferences every few years, with the next one being Forum 2003, in Milan, Italy, from June 30 to July 2, 2003. For more information about Forum 2003, visit the INTECOM web site at http://www.intecom.org. And for more information about the STC's own celebration, kicking off at the Dallas Conference in May 2003, keep watching the Boston Broadside and Web sites http://www.stc.org and http://www.stc-boston.org.

Marguerite Krupp is an Associate Fellow of STC and a member of STC@50, the Society-level committee working on the STC's Golden Anniversary Celebration.

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