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In December 2016, I was elected President of the Society for Technical Communication New England Chapter, after serving the second half of the 2015-2016 year as Vice President.

Hello, everyone. It's been months since I last contributed to this website, but I wanted to provide an update on my situation since my previous blog post, and to give an outlook on where I'm going.

How many words do you use on an everyday basis? On average, English speakers use 1,500 words every day. When it comes to technical communication, using that many words is difficult, especially for localization. Some English words don't have equivalents in other languages. To make technical communication easier, and to ensure that the intent and meaning of technical documents are preserved when they are translated, it's smart to use Simplified Technical English, or STE.

Murphy's Law states, "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." That's very true in technical communication; plans don't go according to what a writer envisions, new obstacles come up that impede progress in an Agile sprint, and software breaks, inhibiting usability testing. However, there is a way out, developing strategies to deal with these disasters.

Ever since I became a technical writer, I've undergone a journey of self-actualization and I've been coming to terms with who I am as a person. I wanted to see if there was a reason I work the way I do-with dedication, passion, and in a structured environment. About one month ago, I took a free personality test on 16personalities.com. The result I ended up with was ESFJ-Extraverted, Sensing, Feeling, and Judging.

I have been Canary Systems' technical writer for almost eight months now and I have gained a lot of insight into working for a small company. I am using the skills I learned in my education to help them improve their communication with their users, and I also learned some new tools to help me think of new ways to improve the documentation, such as Doc-to-Help, SnagIt, and JIRA.

It's been almost four months since I last posted to this blog, and many exciting events happened. My employer, Canary Systems, Inc., decided to retain me as their technical writer after my 90-day probationary period, I stepped up to become the vice president of the Society for Technical Communication (STC)'s New England Chapter, and I was the student liaison to the STC Board of Directors for their November 2015 meeting. I am finding new ways to polish my skills and learn the profession by taking on these duties, and I want to set resolutions for my career in 2016.

This past week marked my two-month anniversary at Canary Systems, in New Hampshire. During that time, I had to quickly learn their in-house software and update the content so that the help files and user's guide were current with latest features of the programs. In addition, I am in the process of helping them catch up with their 2014 and 2015 documentation by updating the user's guide to instruct readers how to use the software and some of its newest features.

A lot has been going on in my career this past month, and I was so busy that I didn't have time to post anything to this site. I'll detail my progress at Canary Systems in a future post, but for this one, I want to report on some exciting news.

Yesterday, I completed my first two weeks as Canary Systems' technical writer/documentation specialist. I must say, that it was not what I was expecting at first, but I found that the