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.
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.
Continue reading →
Geoff Hart’s Effective Onscreen Editing is an essential resource for anyone who edits onscreen, regardless of the word processor in use. Geoff’s examples are from Microsoft Word, but most of his recommendations can be translated readily to OpenOffice.org or other programs. The book is available in both PDF and printed forms, each optimised for its format: the PDF is in landscape format, while the printed book is in portrait format. See this page for details.
Continue reading →
The best way to demonstrate your editorial abilities is to show examples of documents before and after you edited them, but often that’s not an option. The best way to expand your skills is to work in the areas you’re interested in, whether that’s expanding into comprehensive editing from copy-editing or working in different subjects, but you may get caught in the common bind of not getting work because you don’t have the relevant experience. How can you get the experience and be able to demonstrate your abilities to others?
Continue reading →
My article Let’s change the career paths for technical editors was published in December 2009 in Volume 9, Number 3 of Corrigo, the STC’s Technical Editing SIG newsletter.
