Category: This Worked for Me

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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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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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This Worked for Me: Three Collaboration Tools for Technical Editors Who Use Word

By Amanda Altamirano

Many businesses use Microsoft Word as their primary tool for creating documentation and other digital texts. Using Word can be challenging when performing edits with multiple subject matter experts (SMEs) and individual contributors with varied writing skill levels.

As a technical communicator who was tasked with managing product suite documentation in Word, I had to find ways to streamline technical editing. After months of trial and error, I found three collaboration tools that integrate with Word that worked for me.

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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.