The Official Publication of the STC Technical Editing SIG
By Bryce Arghiere
The facts can dishearten. On average, Web users read 20% of the text on a webpage, covering around 62 words before leaving the site within 15 seconds. The challenge of writing for readers who barely read calls for a unique and fearless approach to editing. Continue reading “Web Editing: Making Content Count”
By Christa Bedwin
When the Corrigo managing editor saw that I specialize in teaching engineers and scientists to write, she asked me some provocative questions, and then asked if I would turn the answers into a blog post. I would be happy to discuss if you like—please find me on LinkedIn. Continue reading “The Joys of Teaching Engineers to Write”
by Geoff Hart
Pinker, Steven. 2014. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. Penguin, 359 p.
We editors love our style guides and accumulate them by the dozen so we can seek insights to solve vexing editorial problems. But if we’re honest, we’ll admit that we return to some guides more than others—usually the ones that support our preferences and prejudices. Even for those references, we sometimes wonder whether certain recommendations make sense, or whether they’re just rules for the sake of rules—the author’s prejudices carved in stone, as in Theodore Bernstein’s eponymous “Miss Thistlebottom” or even The Elements of Style, which William Strunk began carving in stone nearly a century ago. Continue reading “Book Review: The Sense of Style”
By Christina Vasilevski
Frequently Asked Questions. If customers ask certain questions so often that your company requires a dedicated FAQ page, the answers should be so obvious that they write themselves, right?
Not quite. Continue reading “Frequently Asked Questions: What Kind of Editing Do They Need, and How Much?”
By Adrienne Julier
A few years ago, I went to a high school graduation, and the valedictorian—an extremely intelligent young woman with close to a perfect SAT score—got up to speak. Her speech was impassioned and obviously well planned; unfortunately, it was also so loaded with obscure words that the vast majority of the audience—including me—couldn’t understand what she was saying. As I glanced around the theater, I soon saw people looking at their programs or, even worse, their phones. Continue reading “Communicating Financial Information: It’s Not What You Know, It’s How Well You Explain It”