Category: Processes

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Newbies’ Corner: Editing in an International Virtual Team (A Collaboration between Students at Mercer University and the Université de Paris)

Editor’s Note: This is another article in our Newbies’ Corner series. If you or your students are interested in submitting an article for this feature, please contact me at editor@stc-techedit.org.

By Madison Bellew, Jeremy Collins, Alex Donnelly, Danielle Levy, Sydnei Mayers, Jeremiah Pulliam, Kim Wallace, and Victoria Whitehead

Technical editing is often facilitated by technology, both for the practice of editing and for communication among contributors. Students in technical communication programs bring their own perspective to editing experiences that might differ from those of more experienced professional technical editors.

In this article, students in an international technical communication class at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, U.S., share their perspectives and the lessons they learned during their experience with an international editing project completed using virtual teaming. In the project, the Mercer University students edited a report written by students at the Université de Paris about technical communication in France. Students at both universities used multiple platforms to communicate as a team about expectations for the group, the report itself, and the edits made by the Mercer University students. 

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This Worked for Me: How Do You Want That Edited?

By Yoel Strimling

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.

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This Worked for Me: Live Editing – A Helpful Exercise

by Paula Robertson, STC Associate Fellow

Have you ever wished for a “quick-and-dirty” way to impart all of your editing expertise to a recipient of your edits without having to explain and comment and rewrite and suggest and explain some more, back and forth, in written edits? If only there was a way for your thought process and rationale to be magically conveyed along with your detailed words, rewrites, and deletions. (Why isn’t it obvious to them anyway? Alas, but our education systems didn’t train us to write clearly.)

You might say editors are just wired differently from writers. Rather, writers have different goals than editors do. But isn’t there some easy way for us to come together of one mind toward the common purpose of clearly communicating to our mutual target audience? I believe the answer is Yes. Yes, there is.

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Conversation Starter: How Can We Better Determine an Editor’s Skill Before Hiring?

Editor’s Note: As part of our Conversation Starter feature, we present what we hope is the first part of an ongoing discussion about the best way to test an editor’s skills before hiring.
The author here presents a number of thoughts and ideas, and wants to hear what others think about them, to know if you’ve had similar or counter experiences, and to learn about what other innovative measures you might be taking to solve the issue.


Want to join the conversation? Email your thoughts to editor@stc-techedit.org, or write them in the Comments section at the end of this article. We’ll publish them in future issues.

By Odile Sullivan-Tarazi

We’ve got a problem in tech.

We require a lot of our editors, more so than is usual in other disciplines.

The editors who work in tech need to be clear and logical thinkers, but also nimble and creative. They often work in several content types, for various audiences. They may be thinking a brand-new project through from the beginning or evaluating one at an early milestone. They often participate in developing the very guidelines that they and the writers will be following. They may also develop templates, models, annotated samples, or other resources. When it comes to the editing itself, they may be called upon to restructure or rewrite, to tweak syntax or diction or tone, or simply to sort out the caps and sweep the commas into place. In short, tech editors are many types of editor in one. Nor are they told which role to play when, but most typically must themselves analyze the writing, judge what is needed, and determine how best to accomplish those tasks (insofar as is possible) in the given timeframe. Then, whatever the level of edit, as there will typically be no one else to do so, they’ll also be proofing their own work.

That’s some spectrum. How does one test for all of this beforehand?

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Coming Attractions: Let’s Talk about How to Test an Editor’s Skills before Hiring

What’s the best way to vet appropriate candidates for technical editing positions? Technical editing practitioners want to ensure that their skill sets are properly understood, and documentation managers want to feel confident that they’ve hired the best person.

As part of Corrigo‘s series of Conversation Starter articles, I’ve asked Odile Sullivan-Tarazi to start a conversation on this topic based on her personal experiences, both as a tester and as a testee. Her article will be published here on Corrigo on 14 January 2020.

To join in on what we hope will be a fascinating conversation, you can submit your own article on the subject to Corrigo (editor@stc-techedit.org), or you can write your thoughts the Comments section. If there are enough comments, we’ll collect them all and post them as an article as well.