Susheila Khera
When I was in graduate school, a professor hired me as an editor for a sprawling, ambitious education project.
The Paperless Promise
Lawrence Don-Elysyn
Many years back when I was a mite less gray on the sides, I began to read about the “paperless” office. It was one of many promises that technology made to my generation back in the halcyon days of the fifties and sixties.
“Jabberwocky” and the Technical Editor
Peggy Emard
Technical editors may experience anxiety and trepidation when asked to edit documents with unfamiliar content. As an example, you may be a talented and an experienced editor of computer handbooks, but how would you edit a graduate-level textbook on biochemistry? A dictionary, a coach, style sheets, and a basic biochemistry textbook would be useful tools. However, you may not have time to gain extensive knowledge about an unfamiliar topic. If you know how to understand the meaning of unknown words through context, you can achieve editing expertise more quickly.
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The Hammer: A Sort of True Story
Lawrence Don-Elysyn
Once upon a time, a group of people that we will call “the Company” obtained a contract to put up a house. This entailed a great deal of nailing. In the preplanning stages, someone figured out that 10,000 nails would have to be hammered in to build this house. This seemed like a frightening amount, and the Manager decided to do something about it.
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Mapping Information for Retrievability
Melanie G. Flanders
This is the Information Age. We are relentlessly inundated with more data than we could ever process in a dozen lifetimes. People don’t read documents for the sheer fun of it (unless it’s a good sci-fi or romance novel); they pick them up because they need specific information.