2025 ASTC Conference

2025 Conference Presenters

What a fabulous line up we have for this year! Each presenter brings their experience, ideas, and enthusiasm to the conference to provide attendees with something new.

We thank them all for their time and effort!

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Roslyn Abela

Roslyn's presentation is titled, How good structure helps efficient stakeholder sign-off.

A document in plain language considers language, structure, design and usability. Roslyn will focus on the structure component and how understanding structure can help achieve both efficient sign-off with stakeholders and a great outcome for readers.

Roslyn Abela is an ASTC member and has more than 25 years’ experience as a Communications Manager, technical writer, editor and plain language specialist. Roslyn's passion for plain language is simply this; we’re all busy, so let’s make important company communications easier to read, so it can be read once and we can get on with our day.

Marie Alafaci

Marie's presentation is titled, Your ideal customer is not a demographic (or why your Home page is scaring off clients).

Marie will talk about:

The two biggest mistakes she sees in web copy
Psychographics versus demographics
Stop talking about your credentials.
Clients assume you know what you’re doing. They want you to put them at the centre of all communication from you.

Marie Alafaci is an ASTC member and she's a marketing copywriter and podcaster who doesn’t do salesy. She’s all about clear copy, smart strategy and lasting impact.

Oh, and she’s a big fan of vintage illustrations, steam punk and ginger cats.

Katherine Barcham

Katherine's presentation is titled Building accessibility into your daily work.

Making something accessible can feel overwhelming. But technical communicators have the biggest opportunity to make huge differences to someone's digital experience. This session will get you thinking about the small tweaks to make your great content accessible to more people.

Some of the learning outcomes include:

Examine what you already know and do as part of your content creation process.
Refocus what you do through the lens of access barriers that you may (or may not) already know about.
Look at how small changes can make a huge difference in making content more accessible.
Apply all of this to some of the more problematic areas of digital content to see how it works in practice.

Katherine Barcham is obsessed with making content accessible for all. She works as a digital accessibility specialist, helping people make their products and services more accessible to everyone.

Kate Burridge

Kate's presentation is titled The tidy-up work of language change.

Kate looks at the key shifts and mutations of English language history. Often language change is shaped by conflicting pressures — optimising one feature can introduce complications in others. It’s a continual cycle of disruption and adjustment, and over the years historical linguists have been identifying the various self-regulating devices that work to repair and restore.

Kate will focus on analogy, a powerful cognitive tool — and one of the strongest forces for making complex things simple again.

Kate Burridge is Professor of Linguistics at Monash University and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. Her main areas of research are language change (focus on changing vocabulary and grammar), the notion of linguistic taboo, the structure and history of English, popular perceptions of language (and fall-out).

She's authored or edited more than 20 books on different aspects of language. Kate is a regular presenter of language segments on radio and writes for The Conversation; she was a weekly panellist on ABC TV’s Can We Help (2007-11) and has given a TEDx talk Telling it like it isn’t.

Marc Chee

Marc's presentation is titled How do we read? A deconstruction of the structure of reading and writing.

People don't actually read documents or text in order. For efficiency, we bounce around and between topics. So how can we structure our documents to support the reader's natural flow instead of trying to force them into an ordered, unnatural reading pattern?

Marc Chee is an Engineering Educator at Canva. Coming from a Tertiary Education background, Marc has taught thousands of students Computer Science at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and has a strong passion for teaching and learning.

Dave Gash

Dave is presenting two sessions.

Music and Writing: A Beautiful Duet

Are music and language really intertwined? How does listening, or even learning, music affect our technical communication skills? This session explores the connection between musical features like melody and rhythm and written/spoken language abilities. We'll look at both general and specific benefits of using music to improve our writing, and look at conclusions from some scientific studies along the way.

In Defence of Prescriptivism, or, "Stop Saying That!"

Okay, I admit it: language changes; word usage evolves; definitions merge, split, and mature over time. Fine, but that doesn't mean I have to like it!

This session examines descriptive versus prescriptive approaches to language and, while accepting language evolution, makes a case for at least having rules, and for following them. We'll explore some common word usage, see how some words have changed for better or worse, and cover how rules -- some pragmatic, some arbitrary -- help us communicate more clearly.

Dave Gash is a programmer, writer, musician, and technical publications specialist from California. He has over 30 years of training and documentation experience with companies like Microsoft and Google. He is a great friend of the ASTC and has presented at numerous ASTC Conferences.

Rebs Harris

Rebs' presentation is titled Get down with Word - the page count, that is!

Inspired by the need to simplify documents based on both user feedback and business imperatives, Rebs will share tips and tricks for redesigning content in Microsoft Word to dramatically reduce the lengths of documents. She'll show how to transform unwieldy content into simple ‘one-page wonders’ through radical editing and formatting and layout hacks. She'll also discuss the pros and cons of these ‘at-a-glanceability’ optimisations.

Rebs Harris is an IPEd accredited editor, a lapsed civil engineer, and a Bob Dylan nut. She has 13 years of experience as a communication professional. Like a rolling stone, Rebs moves around a bit and her work has spanned technical writing, instructional design, academic editing, and content strategy and development. She revels in making stuff that is consistent, engaging, and – above all – useful for the intended audience.

Neil James

Neil's presentation is titled Motivating your readers ethically using ancient and modern tools.

Plain language offers crucial techniques that help to make the wording, structure and design of documents as clear as possible. But do these alone ensure that your text will motivate your readers and do so ethically?

The plain language ISO 24495-1 specification specifies an ethical framework, yet to meet these requirements, it's useful to supplement plain language techniques with some rhetorical tools.

Civic rhetoric is the oldest discipline in the history of communication. Since Aristotle’s Ars Rhetorica, it has offered practical reasoning tools to motivate an audience. Neil will illustrate 4 types of reasoning that you can use to motivate readers when developing content.

After careers in government and the media, Neil James worked as a freelance writer and editor before specialising in Plain English. He co-founded the Plain English Foundation in Australia with Dr Peta Spear in 2003, and served as its Executive Director for more than 20 years.

Neil is also active in plain language internationally. He was founding chair of the International Plain Language Federation in 2008 and served as chair of the Federation’s Certification Committee in 2021-22 before returning as overall Federation Chair in 2023.

Dave Newdick

Dave's presentation is titled Making SVG files simple.

PowerPoint has some really powerful features for working with graphic files. However, Dave’s presentation isn't about PowerPoint, but using PowerPoint (and other tools) to create and edit SVG graphic files.

Dave will talk about the following:

Graphic file types and potential issues (over-compression in .jpg files, poor resolution, and other quality issues)
Tools to create SVG files
Creating SVG files using PowerPoint
Basic vector edits using PowerPoint
Output SVG files from PowerPoint
Edit SVG file code (using Notepad++)

Dave Newdick is a long-time member of the ASTC and served as Association President and Vice President. He started his career as an aircraft technician in the Royal Australian Air Force. Dave now works as a technical communicator across many different industries. His experiences include manufacturing, engineering, technology, mining, explosives, government, logistics, health and safety, and defence.

Dave is a national coordinator in the Simplified Technical English Maintenance Group (STEMG), an international group of representatives who maintain and update the Simplified Technical English specification.

Gareth Oakes

Gareth's presentation is titled Bridging the Gap.

To make complex things simple, we Technical Communicators need to bridge the gap with our customers. We need to meet our end users where they are, perhaps by re-examining the idea of how to make their lives simpler, not how to make our content simpler?

The benefits of making content simpler include:

Simplified process of content creation
Enriched delivery experience
Additional value for the customer
Tighter feedback loops.

Gareth Oakes is a content technology strategist and leader with 25 years experience solving problems across many international industry sectors. He is a software enthusiast with deep knowledge of specialist tools and technologies covering technical publications, eLearning, scientific journals, codes and standards, legislation, rules and regulations. Gareth always brings fresh ideas and helps push teams to leverage the best of technology to exceed expectations and achieve more than ever before.

Swapnil Ogale

Swapnil's presentation is titled Technical writing like it is 2005!

Swapnil takes us back to 2005 when technical writers lived in perpetual fear of the blue screen of death erasing three days of work. And when 'version control' meant emailing documents with filenames like UserGuide_FINAL_v2_REALLY_FINAL_updated.doc. Swapnil will take us back to simpler times, talking about:

Misplaced tags and reformatting nightmares
Managing conditional text that would mysteriously disappear during PDF generation
The efforts required to generate help files that displayed correctly across the browser landscape
Backup strategies that bordered on paranoia
Logistics of managing review comments scribbled in margins and on sticky notes.

Definitely, a true appreciation of how far we have come as technical communication specialists.

Swapnil Ogale has consulted at, and worked with multiple organisations for the last 20 years, setting up documentation teams, process, workflows and tool-chains. This includes strategising content needs, setting up information architecture, and facilitating user research for documentation sites. He currently works at Amazon Web Services (AWS) Australia working with internal teams and external customers to create robust technical documentation across tools and solutions.

Carl Sarelius

Carl's presentation is titled S1000D In the Combat Zone.

He was first exposed to S1000D in 2004 and immediately saw the specifications potential, but also witness the result when combined with poor change management.

So, Carl's presentation isn't so much about the S1000D tools, but a front line memoir from a technical writer actively using the specification.

Carl Sarelius is a long-time member of the ASTC and served as Association Treasurer for many years. He has over 20 years of Technical Writing experience, predominantly in the Defence sector. He now works with Hanwha Defence Australia using S1000D to produce the data modules for the operators and maintainers of the Infantry Fighting Vehicle, also known as Redback.

David Whitbread

David's presentation is A Simple Talk.

In his talk, David will introduce his 5-biscuit theory of simplification. It's based on principles gleaned from simplification across different media and professions, including film, web design, branding, music, plain language and food.

Being simple, clear and easy. It’s not only subtraction. It can be addition and multiplication. And subdivision.

It’s certainly not choosing the easy way out. As famous US designer Paul Rand said, ‘Design can be simple, that’s why it is so complicated.’ And as Lincoln, Twain or Pascal may have said, ‘I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.’

We'll look at clarity, avoiding confusion, using logic and reasoning, and why a well-chosen
metaphor works. When to use diagrams. Understanding how an audience will interpret content.

How we need to take the time, so our audience don’t.

But we'll also look at an old-fashioned idea that is oftentimes forgotten. Elegance. What does it mean for us as communicators? As content creators? Why and how we need to consider it in every job we do. How we make the magic. To delight.

David recently self-published the third edition of The Design Manual, a model of simplification and elegance at work.