Some of you may already have heard me going on (and on and on) about how excited I am about the upcoming STC Summit, next May in Atlanta. I am on the program team, and honored to be among such fine company! We’re in the midst of reviewing proposals, and it is, as always, a very difficult job to choose only a limited number of sessions from a larger number of truly excellent proposals.

But preliminary results are looking just awesome – a few more minor tweaks to the program, and the acceptance letters should be going out soon. I think it is important for submitters to realize that the program team had about 4 times as many proposals as we had slots to fill, so even though a proposal may have been very good, we sometimes had to pass on an excellent proposal for a variety of reasons. There may have been too many proposals on the same topic; there may have been too many of that TYPE of proposal; the topic may have been too short (or too comprehensive) for the submitted time period; the topic may have been presented at too many prior conferences.

If you want to speak about a topic, and your proposal wasn’t selected, please don’t give up! Share your passion with the rest of us in whatever way you can! There are lots of other venues at which you can present your topic, hone your speaking skills, and build a following of your very own! Start with your local STC chapter – they usually put on 8 or 10 program meetings every year – some even do half-day workshops and that sort of thing. Or talk to other groups in your town and bring the message of good communication skills to groups like the IABC, PRSA, IEEE, ASTD, or others. You can also look into regional events (like PCOC or Currents or other local events). If there’s a university or college near you, see if they’re interested in guest speakers.

I love speaking, and I’m consistently impressed and amazed at the variety of subjects that make up the generic field of “technical communication”. Let’s keep sharing and growing our field, and our careers!