Michelle Corbin
I recently re-read the journal article “The Technical Editor as Diplomat: Linguistic Strategies for Balancing Clarity and Politeness” by Mackiewicz and Riley (Technical Communication, Volume 50, Number 1, February 2003, pp. 83-94
).
This article discusses 8 different strategies, based on linguistics research, for balancing clarity and politeness when making editing comments, in the hopes of building and enhancing the author-editor relationship. Although I do not agree with all of the strategies and conclusions that the authors make, I did find it a fascinating article – one that made me actually think about and try to articulate my own thoughts on the role that politeness plays when I make my editing comments.
Although this is not a recently published article, I thought it might be nice to use it to kick off this new type of newsletter article in the Technical Editing SIG blog/newsletter. We receive so much information that it is difficult to know what to take the time to read, and the SIG is trying to help you make a decision as to whether to read an article or not – we want to entice and encourage you to read these articles (and who knows, maybe join a conversation about them on the blog or in our discussion list!).
Do you remember reading this article? Did this entice you into reading it (or re-reading it)? Do you have some thoughts about this article? Please consider sharing them on our blog or as part of our discussion list (I decided to cross-post this to both places, in hopes of encouraging cross-reading/cross-participation in our blog and discussion lists. (:biggrin:) ).