And the bloggers, they were blogging...

March

February – it's the month of Valentine’s Day, the balmier days of summer, and TechCommNZ blog posts on matters grammatical, social, and practical.

Early in the month, Emma Harding uncovered some fascinating research when exploring the use of “they” instead of “he” when referring to a singular antecedent. She also fired a salvo at slavish attention to ill-conceived grammatical rules. It sparked some really interesting conversation in the comments about the different use of he/she/they around the world, and how language has adapted even over the last fifty years. Read the post here.

Our Wellington-based guest contributor, Peter Russell, attended Rob Grover’s presentation about his work on the SCIRT project in Christchurch. Rob’s enthusiasm for technical communication is evident with the devotion he put into helping create a useful learning legacy for future disaster recovery. He claimed, however, that the most useful thing he learned was “how to write an email to a senior manager’s secretary that would get me one hour of her boss’s time”. To be sure, getting past a PA can be on a par with sneaking past Smaug, so he’s gained a brilliant skill. Read more about Rob Grover’s evening in Wellington here.

If you’ve got something that you want to share with the rest of us at TCANZ, why not write us a blog post? Email us at comms@tcanz.org.nz.