As new technologies expand omni-channel publishing requirements and companies extend the global reach of their products, services, and content marketing, the role of editor becomes both more critical and more strategic. Effective editorial, governance, and change management processes directly impact a company’s bottom line.
Continue reading “Editing in a Structured Environment”Of Interest: Editing for Leaner Modern Content Webinar
As a TechComm editor, you often work with old legacy content that is overly formal, poorly structured, and contains unnecessary information.
Your challenge is to reduce complexity and remove unnecessary content to improve the user experience. But how do you get started?
On 8 September 2022 at 10 AM ET (for
your local time zone, go to https://bit.ly/3KHn0A1), join renowned speaker Leah Guren to learn:
- Why fluff is so bad
- Why lean content is a future-proof TechComm skill
- How to identify common forms of fluff
- How to edit aggressively
- How to think creatively to solve structure problems
- …and more!
To order tickets for this webinar, go to: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/editing-for-leaner-modern-content-tickets-387978854197
Of Interest: Definition of Quality (Editing) Panel at ConVEx 2021
Every documentation team strives to produce high-quality content. Unfortunately, the definition of what that means differs significantly, from company to company, from writer to writer, from user to user.
On 28 April 2021 at 0630 EDT at ConVEx 2021, a panel of top-class editors (Dana Aubin, Andrea Studzinski, and me too! :)) will talk about how to identify and prioritize the critical factors that influence the perception of quality, and discuss the best ways to achieve agreement on its definition.
To be a part of this fascinating discussion, as well as get more career-empowering knowledge, practices, networking, and practical solutions to improve your content strategy and technical documentation, register here: https://convex.infomanagementcenter.com
This Worked for Me: How Do You Want That Edited?
While technical editors might be great, most of us aren’t miracle workers. We have deadlines, resource issues, multiple tasks, and so on. While we want the documents we send to our readers to be as good as they can be, we realize that we can’t do everything, and that some sort of compromise needs to be made. The “golden triangle” of Good/Cheap/Fast calls on us to pick only two.
So what do we do? We have to let the document authors (be they technical communicators or engineers) know exactly what we can do and how long it will take us, and then help them plan accordingly. When everybody is “on the same page” and all expectations are clear, the editing process runs much smoother.
Continue reading “This Worked for Me: How Do You Want That Edited?”
This Worked for Me: Checking the Quality of a Hard-Copy Document in 60 Minutes
Editor’s Note: The most popular post of all time on Corrigo is Indian Copyeditors Forum: Connecting Editors, Creating Opportunities. Editing in India is a growing field, and the ICF was founded in 2015 by Vivek Kumar to create awareness about editing in India and bring Indian editorial freelancers together. You can see their first newsletter, iEdit, here.
Yateendra Joshi, the author of this article, is a member of the ICF.
It is my hope that publishing articles written by our colleagues in other countries will expand our own awareness of the global reach of our profession.
As professional technical editors, we are sometimes asked to comment on the quality of a hard-copy document. “Take a quick look and tell me what you think” is a typical request.
In this article, I’m going to suggest a plan for performing this type of quality check in an hour. This plan uses the following definitions when determining quality:
- Freedom from defects
- Conformance to standards
- Suitability for intended use.