Storyteller Guidelines

Many words will be written on the wind and the sand, or end up in some obscure digital vault. But the storytelling will go on until the last human being stops listening. Then we can send the great chronicle of humanity out into the endless universe.
-Henning Mankell

Submission Length, Links and Editing

Story lengths acceptable: 200 words, 500 words, 1000 words. If you have a longer story to tell about working with a technology, we will consider publishing the story as a serial piece of two or more parts.

To enhance the reader experience, we strongly encourage you  to provide links to related material that will be included in the sidebar. For example: if your story relates to bridge building, you could provide a link describing the specific bridge or general information about bridge building.

All submissions will go through an editorial review before final publication on the website. We will provide you with a style guide. Authors should plan on at least one exchange with the editor assigned to their story.

Storyteller Bio and Image

We require a brief biography (~100 words) and a head shot photo. We plan to use tags for grouping authors by Technology profession (e.g. mechanical engineer, millwright) and diverse ability (ADD, hearing.) Authors can opt in for gender and ethnic group identification.

Storyteller Broadcaster Expectations

We encourage all storytellers to spread the word about their story published on www.engineersdaughter.org . Publicize via social media and your personal network. If your place of work has a means of publicizing your story, please do so. We also suggest publicizing your story via alumni newsletters for educational institutions. All this broadcasting will assist The Engineers’ Daughter in reaching “the next wave of technologists.”

Writer Release

All submissions become the property of The Engineers’ Daughter LLC. Authors can republish as long as an attribution to this site is given. All authors will be sent a writer release form to “sign.”

Story Categories

Their Story

Professional development as a technologist hinges upon practicing one’s craft. Oscar Wilde stated “Experience is what everyone calls their mistakes.” While we learn from mistakes, we also learn from working with others and with technology. A “Their Story” illustrates the nuts and bolts of working with technology and something you learned from that experience.

For the “Their Story” content, the following topics have been identified as prompts to contributors:

  • Solving the Sexy Hard Problem
  • Reality of Maintenance
  • The Kludge
  • Economy vs. Efficiency vs. Effectiveness
  • Data Etiquette
  • The Necessity of Standards
  • Rookie Mistakes
  • Newbies Can Contribute
  • Document: Do or Be Lost

We welcome other writing prompts inspired by your own experiences. As the website accumulates stories we will use these prompts as tags to join together similar stories. After accumulating stories we may identify additional tags.

Diverse Ability:

Diversity of workers in technology fields often falls along the lines of gender and ethnic groups. There also exists diversity in the manner that human minds work; in some instances, like Autism Spectrum Disorder, these can be viewed as a disability. Rather than “disability,” this website will use diverse ability. People fall along a spectrum of a characteristic like Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD,) empathy, eyesight. On The Engineers’ Daughter we want to encourage discussion of diverse abilities as they relate to technology.

People fall along a spectrum of a characteristic like Attention Deficient Disorder (ADD.) These spectra do not necessarily have a Gaussian behavior. No human being is identical to any other.

The statement “Every Strength is a Weakness, Every Weakness is a Strength” captures the spirit of the stories in this category. Some initial ideas for this category include:

  • The stories that describe a diverse ability of a technologist, with emphasis on her style of learning and craft of executing her abilities when working with technology or with others.
  • The development of technologies to assist people with a disability. These technologies often morph to a technology used by people society at large.
  • Training of technology workers should embrace the diverse abilities of human beings.

Examples for story tags in this category include: introvert/extrovert, autism, Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences.