Conversation Starter: In Response to the Claim That Technical Editors Need Not Be “Grammarians”

(Editor’s Note: Michelle Corbin’s article, “Technical Editors Do Not Need To Be Grammarians,” started a very interesting conversation about technical editing and grammar.
The following lengthy comment was posted to the original article; to make it easier to continue this fascinating discussion, I’ve turned it into a standalone post.
Please feel free to continue discussing this – send your comments to editor@stc-techedit.org.

By Odile Sullivan-Tarazi

Perhaps it comes down to what you mean by “grammar.”

Continue reading “Conversation Starter: In Response to the Claim That Technical Editors Need Not Be “Grammarians””

New Feature: Conversation Starter

As the official publication of the STC Technical Editing SIG, Corrigo is full of useful information for technical editing practitioners.

But the articles in Corrigo, however helpful they are, are really only a one-way street from the author to you, and not all topics are as cut-and-dried as we would like them to be.

Wouldn’t it be great if, after you read something really interesting, you could continue the discussion with the author? And wouldn’t it be even better if other technical editing practitioners could join in? And wouldn’t it be awesome if all of you could then put into practice what you’d discussed, making your professional lives that much better?

To enable back-and-forth discussion between peers about hot-button topics that affect the world of technical editing, we are introducing a new feature – Conversation Starter!

This new feature will present thought-provoking articles about things that are dear to the hearts of technical editing practitioners.

Because the goal of this feature is to start conversations around these issues, it’s important that we enable you to “have your say” in a way that maximizes the give-and-take needed for a true discussion:

  • You can submit your own article to Corrigo to debate with the author, write what you think about the topic, tell us if you’ve had similar or counter experiences, and to learn about what other innovative measures you might be taking to solve the issue.
  • You can use the Comments section to to do the same thing!
    If there are enough comments on a topic, we’ll collect them all and post them as an article as well.

To make it easier for you to find these articles again in the future, they will be tagged with a Conversation Starter tag, and the titles prefaced with the same phrase.

If you’d like to submit an article to start a conversation about something you feel passionate about OR if you want to continue a conversation that’s already started, please send an email to editor@stc-techedit.org and tell us about it.