The Pitch
Tech Writing Talks would love to get your pitches! We want talks related to technical writing that are helpful, fun, interesting, or unusual. We aim for a mix of talks as short as 5 minutes or as long as 20 minutes. At this time, we’re unable to accept longer-format talks.
In your pitch, let us know:
- Your talk topic
- The audience who would most benefit from your talk
- The proposed length of your talk
- The high-level points of your talk
- The experience that has prompted you to give this talk
We’re looking for talks that:
- Help people think differently about something they take for granted
- Help people learn a new skill
- Share a fun or entertaining take on something related to technical writing
- Teach people about an aspect of the work that they may not have experienced
We can’t accept pitches that are exclusionary or insulting to any individual or group.
The Process
Tech Writing Talks is a new initiative with a process that is still evolving. Broadly:
- You send your abbreviated pitch through the contact form.
- The Tech Writing Talks organizer reviews your pitch.
- If your pitch sounds like a good fit for our audience, we’ll ask for an outline of your talk.
- Possible iteration.
- Go-ahead or talk declined.
- Submit talk recording, summary, bio, photos, and prefered links.
- Final approval, talk scheduled, and honorarium issued!
Pitch Review
We’ll make every effort to review pitches quickly, but may take as long as a week to reply. We will email you to let you know if we’re interested in hearing more, or if we’re unable to accept your pitch at this time. If you don’t hear back within a week, check your spam for a possible missed reply.
Outline Request
The Tech Writing Talks organizer requests an outline of the talk to get a better feel for the talk content than is possible through the pitch. If you’ve already given the talk, feel free to send a slide deck or a recording of the talk for us to review. The outline or slide deck provides the deep contextual info for the organizer to confirm that the talk matches the expectations set by the pitch, and that it continues to sound like a good fit for the audience.
Possible Iteration
In some cases, the Tech Writing Talks organizer may suggest iterating on the proposed outline or slide deck. We may suggest iteration when the talk details are too similar to an existing talk. If we suggest iteration, it’s a sign that we really like your talk idea and want it to succeed!
Go-ahead or Talk Declined
After reviewing the outline, and a possible round of iteration, it may be possible that a talk pitch just isn’t a good fit for Tech Writing Talks at this time. We’ll do our best to avoid declining talks at this stage. Asking you to put together an outline, and taking the time to review that outline and possibly suggest iteration, is a time investment that we can only afford to make for talks whose pitches really sound great for our audience. We want to bring your talk to the world! But if it just doesn’t quite come together, we may need to decline the talk. If the outline is awesome and the talk lives up to expectations set in the pitch, we’ll ask you to record the talk and prepare your talk materials!
If you’d like to use Tech Writing Talk-branded slides, we’re happy to share the slide template. But this is not required.
Submit Recording, Summary, Bio, Photos, and Preferred Links
We’ll provide you with a link to upload your recorded talk video, as well as related materials. We need the following related materials to display the talk on the website:
- Your name, a brief bio, and an image to use on your speaker page
- A short, catchy summary for the YouTube description and your talk page
- An image to use for the video thumbnail and on the talk page. If you’re not able to provide an image, we may screenshot a thumbnail from the talk.
- A list of your preferred social media links, website, or other contact details to link to from your speaker page
Video Requirements
You don’t have to appear in the video! Video where the speaker is visible makes it easier for the audience to connect with the speaker. But we understand that this may not always be technically feasible, or that people may prefer to simply remain off-camera.
However, we cannot accept videos voiced by AI or auto-generated voices at this time.
Please refrain from including any copyrighted material in your recording. This includes copyrighted music or images. YouTube’s algorithms check every video for copyrighted material, and we cannot accept videos that include music or other potentially copyrighted details.
Final Approval, Scheduling, and Honorarium!
We’ll review the recording for quality. If the recording is blurry, or if the audio quality is poor, we may not be able to accept the recording. If the recording quality is not acceptible, we’ll invite you to re-record the talk. If equipment or technical issues prevent you from producing a recording of acceptible quality, we may need to decline the talk at this time. We want to provide a minimum level of quality for our channel subscribers, and can only publish talks that meet that level of quality.
If the recording is free of issues, we’ll issue final approval and schedule the video! We’ll let you know when the video will go live. At this point, we’ll confirm your details and issue the honorarium. We’ll post about your video on our social media channels when it goes live.
Note: You maintain all ownership of the content in your talk. The talk is in no way a work for hire. The honorarium is a token of appreciation for your time and effort, but in no way constitutes a transfer of ownership of your content or ideas. If you ever want us to remove your talk in the future, contact us and we’ll be happy to remove it.
The Honorarium
At this time, Tech Writing Talks is purely self-funded by the organizer. We can only afford a small ($100 US) honorarium to show our appreciation for sharing your enthusiasm and expertise. If Tech Writing Talks gains funding through sponsorship, the honorarium will increase.
Tech Writing Talks will send the honorarium for an accepted, uploaded, and scheduled talk by a method that is mutually convenient.