Making Technical Editing a Profession

Nicolette Ladoulis

When I decided to go back to graduate school in 1994, I had no idea I’d end up a technical editor. I finished school in 1996, not knowing much about technical writing.

One of my classmates was a technical writer with Exxon, but it hadn’t crossed my mind that technical communication was a career that suited me. Nevertheless, I’m convinced my choice of a degree in applied linguistics helped me find my way into technical editing.

Five years out of college, I was still looking for a real profession. The only certainties I had were that I needed structure and wanted to go into an office and work with people, and that I didn’t want to be a manager.
For some inexplicable reason, many of my former English professors were certain a profession as an English teacher was for me. English wasn’t even my major. But I set up everything for a master’s degree in English and went to meet a colleague of a former professor. Books lined her walls. She told me how I would read books in Old English first and then those in Middle English. Next, she rattled off the litany of novels I would have to read. Here I was, two months away from semester start, just realizing there was no way I could do a literature degree! I told the professor point-blank and was ready to leave.

Then the most amazing thing happened. She smiled and calmly sat back in her chair. She started to talk about linguistics and rhetoric, which was her specialty. She told me how she had served as an expert witness in a court trial and used forensic linguistics to determine the author of a malicious note at a company. I was intrigued (and relieved to know I could get a degree in English without having to read literature).

After graduation, I taught ESL to foreign students at the university and found myself struggling to answer their questions. Even with courses that taught me to discern the rules of language from syntax, phonology, morphology, semantics, discourse analysis, and second language acquisition, I realized I knew the language only as a native speaker. I had an innate knowledge, not an analytical understanding, of the rules.

While teaching ESL was interesting, it wasn’t lucrative. I heard rumors that half the applied linguistics majors from our program taught ESL and about half ended up as technical editors for a local medical center. But I didn’t actively follow up. Then a NASA contractor came across my resume and wanted to talk to me about something called “technical writing,” which seemed the oddest of pseudo-professions to me at the time. But my readings in linguistic research had given me a renewed appreciation for the scientific method I suppose, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Thanks to the efforts of the STC to promote the profession of technical communication, younger students won’t have to wind through such a circuitous maze to find a niche for their skills. With technical writing and technical editing established as legitimate careers today, many opportunities now exist for both practical applications and theoretical research.

Staying Current

Being a professional means staying educated in your field. If you’re considering continuing education options or academic degrees, you might want to take a look at linguistics or cognitive psychology, or at least programs that draw from research about language and communication processes.

Don Bush, columnist for Intercom, has commented on the solid training that a linguistics background gives technical editors. Karen Schriver’s Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Text for Readers makes extensive references to research in linguistics and cognitive psychology.¹ In his May 2004 article in Technical Communication, “Reconsidering Some Prescriptive Rules of Grammar and Composition,” Bradford Connatser rightly contends that “writing and editing decisions should be based not only on prescriptive grammar but also on ‘organic’ grammar (the grammar ‘hard wired’ in our brains), research in cognitive psychology and human factors, research in other relevant disciplines, and reflection.”²

If you’re not in the market for a new degree but you just want to read and get the most of your STC membership, here are two additional suggestions.

1. Check out the interview with technical editor and author Judith Tarutz on the EEI Communications website (www.eeicommunications.com/eye/tarutz.html).³
2. Read the February 2003 Technical Communication article “The Technical Editor as Diplomat: Linguistic Strategies for Balancing Clarity and Politeness” by professors Jo Mackiewicz and Kathryn Riley.
3. Based on techniques from pragmatics, an area of study in linguistics that looks at language in social contexts, the article gives tips on how to balance the indirect-direct dilemma in written comments to authors. Interestingly, the authors uncovered differences in the types of comments that are effective for native versus non-native English speakers.

 

References

1. Schriver, K.A. 1997. Dynamics in document design: creating text for readers. New York, NY: Wiley.
2. Connatser, Bradford. 2004. “Reconsidering some prescriptive rules of grammar and composition.” Technical Communication. 51: 264-275.
3. Smith, Sally. “Getting there from here: total immersion editing.” EEI Communications. http://www.eeicommunications.com/eye/tarutz.html
4. Mackiewicz, Jo and Riley, Kathryn. 2003. “The technical editor as diplomat: linguistic strategies for balancing clarity and politeness.” Technical Communication. 50: 83-94.

Nicolette Ladoulis has been an acquisitions editor for Corrigo for the past two years. She has a master’s degree in applied linguistics from the University of Houston and works as a technical editor for Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) with an engineering analysis group at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.