About technical editors

January 22, 2010 · Uncategorized · Comments Off

Technical editors are people who edit technical information. They work in many fields, including engineering, computer hardware and software, science, medicine, law, banking, and website development for any business or activity.

Technical editors’ primary job is to ensure documents are suitable for their target audience, thus technical editing is really a quality control job.

This website is a place for technical editors to:

  • Share knowledge, experiences and resources
  • Demonstrate to writers, managers and others the wide range of knowledge and skills technical editors have to offer

Non-editors are welcome too! Much of the information you’ll find here is applicable to writers, managers, and people working in other roles, and many editors have other job titles or multiple roles.

New book planned

June 19, 2011 · Books · (No comments)

I am preparing to write a book on using styles and templates in OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice Writer, aimed at intermediate and advanced users. I am considering doing it as a series of tutorials, each using a different example (such as a thesis, a magazine, a software user guide), and combine the tutorials into a book, along with a reference section at the back. Examples and context (when and why to use something) are essential, as are lots of diagrams to illustrate concepts such as the sequence of page styles in a book.

The book will be under CC-BY license and will be provided as a free PDF as well as in printed form and possibly in HTML on my Taming OOo/LibO website. It should be useful for users of both OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice (and other derivatives).

I am collecting topics on a wiki page on The Document Foundation’s website, and I will probably also put the list on my Taming OOo/LibO website.

You are very welcome to add your “wish list” of topics or examples to be included in the book. I don’t promise to include them all, but it will be a better book if I know what information readers want.

You are also very welcome to review and comment on the book as it develops. I will put drafts on my website for this purpose.

I suspect I won’t get around any time soon to updating the website version of my book on self-publishing using OOo, so those pages are mostly out of date, although you can still get the PDF from this page.

New Perspectives on Technical Editing

December 8, 2010 · Books · (No comments)

I have an essay titled “Copyediting and Beyond” in New Perspectives on Technical Editing, edited by Avon J. Murphy, published by Baywood, 2010.

I am honored to appear in a book containing essays by some of the field’s leaders whom I admire greatly, including Carolyn Rude, Michelle Corbin, Geoff Hart, and George Hayhoe (an incomplete list).

Developing Company Editing Standards

September 10, 2010 · Standards & style · (No comments)

This article is nothing dramatically new, but it is a good summary. Developing Company Editing Standards, by Kristine Haugseth.

This presentation covers how to develop editing standards for content. It provides tips on how to get started when no conventions exist and how to improve coverage of topics when time and resources are limited. It describes how to get buy-in for editing standards from management and project members. This topic is of interest to all editors because pushback against editing changes is very common, and consistency is difficult to maintain without coworkers’ buy-in to established standards.

The value of editors

July 23, 2010 · Skills · (No comments)

Paul Ford, in Real Editors Ship, says some things I’ve been trying to tell people for years. Other editors will understand what he’s talking about; many of the people who need us most won’t get it. Here’s a quote:

Editors are really valuable, and, the way things are going, undervalued. These are people who are good at process. They think about calendars, schedules, checklists, and get freaked out when schedules slip. Their jobs are to aggregate information, parse it, restructure it, and make sure it meets standards. They are basically QA for language and meaning.

Editing troubleshooting procedures

July 19, 2010 · Skills · (No comments)

The Diagnosis-Resolution Structure in Troubleshooting Procedures, by David K. Farkas, on the WritersUA website.

In this paper, I define troubleshooting procedures and briefly sketch out how they are developed. Then I analyze the genre’s underlying architectural structure of diagnosis and resolution, showing both simple and complex configurations of symptoms and solution methods. These configurations are in part constrained by the nature of the technical problem; but they are also the consequence of design decisions. Understanding structure enables us to meaningfully classify the very diverse instances of this genre, reveals key design issues, and is apt to contribute to experimental research insofar as structure is central to many of the most useful research questions we can ask.

Double numeration in single-chapter documents

July 18, 2010 · Grammar · 2 comments

A reader wrote:
I have a quick question for you about numbered heads in documents.

In general, numbered section heads use the chapter number as the first digit – but that’s only if you have multiple chapters in a book (1.1, 2.1, 3.1…).

What if you have only one chapter in a book? Do the sections become 1, 2, 3…?

I haven’t been able to find anything discussing this, so if you know of any reference material to back this up, I’d be much obliged!

Readability Report for OpenOffice.org on Windows

July 17, 2010 · Tools & technology · Comments Off

I haven’t tried this extension to OpenOffice.org, because I don’t use Windows, but it sounds interesting (if not misused or abused as often happens with “readability” scores). Would like to hear from someone who has used it.

The Readability Report tool scores your document for readability, cohesion and information density. These scores provide the author with an indication of how well the intended audience will understand the text. The scores use a variety of computational linguistic techniques to determine the reading level of the text.

ASCAP’s Attack on Creative Commons

July 14, 2010 · Copyright · (No comments)

The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) has launched a campaign to raise money from its members to hire lobbyists to protect them against”the dangers of Copyleft, which they claim groups such as Creative Commons are promoting in order to undermine Copyright.

If you are unfamiliar with the licenses promoted by Creative Commons (CC), you might be taken in by these claims, but they are not true. Lawrence Lessig, cofounder and board member of CC (his day job is Harvard Law School professor and director of the Safra Center for Ethics) explains the situation in this article. In brief, what CC promotes is choice for creators of works (writers, musicians, artists), using more flexible variations on copyright license terms.

Engaging readers in documentation

June 2, 2010 · Conferences, Skills, Tools & technology · 1 comment

At the AODC 2010 conference, Sarah Maddox, who works for Atlassian, an agile development environment, spoke on engaging readers in the documentation and the concept of documentation as an emotional experience.

Sarah explained the advantages to both the customers and the company of involving readers (users) and discussed some of the techniques that Atlassian has been experimenting with. These include social media (blogs, a forum, and Twitter), a “doc sprint” (an intensive time spent producing documents such as tutorials), encouraging users to update community documentation on a wiki, links to readers’ blogs, and an interactive game that customers can use to help them through the complex installation and configuration of a product.
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AODC 2010

June 1, 2010 · Conferences · (No comments)

The 13th Australasian Online Documentation and Content Conference (AODC 2010) was held in Darwin, Australia’s Northern Territory, 12-14 May. I found the conference both highly informative (all of the sessions interested me) and a lot of fun; thus it was well worth the cost.

Some highlights for me included the talks on structured content and DITA, engaging your readers with the documentation, an overview of Google Apps, user assistance design and implementation for iPhone apps—and the chance to fondle an iPad several weeks before they became available in Australia. I’m now mulling over the possibilities for putting some of what I’ve learned—about both structured authoring and engaging readers—into use at OpenOffice.org.

For details of the speakers and their topics, see speakers page and the agenda pages on the AODC website. The speakers are regulars at AODC as well as WritersUA and similar conferences, with new material every year, presented in an entertaining manner.

I am not going to attempt to summarise the sessions, though I’ll mention some topics of particular interest to me in subsequent blog posts.

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