Category: Processes

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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.

By Yateendra Joshi

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.
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Four Questions for Considering the Needs and Circumstances of Our Audience

By Danielle Karr

A company must communicate with its customers; however, whether these communications are valuable to the audience is another question.

A company’s content is often influenced by the individuals who internally surround the document rather than the external target audience, which forces technical communicators to sometimes release content that does not accurately reflect or meet readers’ needs. This type of content creation process can lead companies to measure their content’s success by how it satisfies internal (often managerial) opinions rather than how well the document fulfills the content needs of the intended audience.

Luckily, technical editors have the power to correct this corporate messaging problem by championing readership interests, needs, and sensitivities during document creation and review process—safeguarding the audience from irrelevant, insensitive, or burdensome content.

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The Best of Corrigo: Setting Up an Editorial Review Process

By Sarah Barczyk
(originally published in 2009; updated with permission by Corrigo staff in 2018)

So you want to be a technical editor. You’re well-versed in grammar, style, punctuation, and the mechanics of the English language. You know what it takes to produce a clear, concise, readable paragraph and a coherent technical document.

Subject-matter experts within your company recognize that you’re an asset and routinely seek you out for writing help, and perhaps enlist your aid in editing large documents. But you know that so much more can be done. All you need is a process. It sounds so simple.

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New Feature: This Worked for Me

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

One of the great things about having a community of like-minded professionals is that there might be someone here dealing with technical editing issues that might be quite similar to yours – using tools and process that might help you as well!

To help you see what your colleagues are doing to help them do their jobs better, we are introducing a new feature – This Worked for Me!

This new feature will provide real examples of tools and processes that real people doing real technical editing in the field use to solve real issues and improve the quality of the content that they edit.

Basically, the authors of these articles will say “here’s a great thing that I use, maybe you’ll find it useful as well!”

We will try to make sure that the articles in this feature are not simply advertisements for tools – we aren’t interested in what the tool does, we want to know what we can do with the tool.

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

If you’d like to submit a story about a tool or process you’ve personally used to improve the quality of your technical editing or make your professional life easier, please send an email to editor@stc-techedit.org and tell us about it.

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Editing People Who Hate to Be Edited

On 4 October 2018, STC Technical Editing SIG member Marcia Shannon gave a fascinating talk entitled “Editing People Who Hate to Be Edited” as part of the SIG’s quarterly meeting.

Corrigo Correspondents Laura Allen and Denise Collins attended, and summarized it for those who couldn’t make it.

Continue reading “Editing People Who Hate to Be Edited”