Society for Technical Communication—Israel Chapter

The Oscars should be run the way the STC competition is. Suppose you're a cinematographer, you get nominated for an Oscar, and somebody else wins it. Nobody tells you exactly why you were good enough to get nominated in the first place, and nobody tells you why you didn't win.

You ought to get a detailed explanation written by experts. They should take the trouble to say "We admire the way you handled the werewolf in the moonlight, but we think that in the love scenes you got a little crazy with the filters." That would be helpful. You want to know what a group of objective, well-trained people thought. Otherwise, who's to say you didn't win just because of who your friends are? Or lose because the project you were working on turned into an infamous turkey through no fault of yours?

Or maybe you were really good, good enough to win in any normal year,  but you happened to be up against a once-in-a-lifetime masterpiece. Those are the Oscar breaks.

The STC way is so much better. First of all, you're not competing against anyone else. If your work deserves to be cited as distinguished and so does the work of half a dozen other people, then you all get the same award. If nobody's work is that good, then nobody gets that award. How you're ranked depends on the quality of your own work and not on the quality of anybody else's.

More important yet is the detailed individual evaluation written for each entry. Even if they bestow their highest award on your work, the STC judges will tell you how it could be further improved. And even if your work receives no award at all, they will find aspects of it to appreciate while offering specific criticisms. Because the judges' criticisms are so useful, I think of the prizes, valuable though they are for your workplace creds, as a sort of consolation given to writers who did not get criticized enough.

And when you enter the STC Israel chapter competition, in English at least, the people who judge your work are not your fellow Israelis. Your colleagues not in a position to blackball you for rejecting their job application ten years ago, or to go easy on you because you buy one another beers at lunchtime. The people who judge your work are in another country and eat lunch with other people. They belong to another chapter that swaps judging services with Israel.

I predict that by the end of the decade, entries that aren't in English will be similarly swapped among the STC Galilee, STC Dan, and STC Judea chapters. For the time being, though, one Israeli chapter is all the STC has. So yes, if you enter in Hebrew or Arabic, the panel of judges may include someone you know. For that reason, the judges don't sign their evaluations; and for that reason, there's a sizeable discount on entries that aren't in English. Still better than the Oscars, where the "best in a foreign language" nod is given by judges who don't need to understand a word of the prize-winning work.

The only thing that the STC awards don't have going for them is a catchy name. I think we should call them the Esties.