Editing?

Subject: Editing?
From: "Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 08:55:10 -0400


David Neeley remarked: <<In most technical documentation shops I have seen,
the "technical editor" is generally the *least* technical person on the
staff, is usually paid less, and is generally confined to catching
typographical errors, wrong page numbers or other formatting, and the
like.>>

Count me in the opposite camp: I'm officially called a "technical editor"
(says so on my business card), yet have a better technical background than
some of our techs, a wider technical background than some of our
researchers, get paid as much as many of our researchers, and am responsible
for heavy substantive editing, as well as the usual copyediting stuff. (Call
me "Geffy the Typo Slayer" <g>)

<<In my opinion, this is a significant barrier to editors doing the kind of
substantive content editing you speak of in your article.>>

It certainly is. If you're accorded less status than Word's spellchecker,
there's little incentive to stay and do a good job. The only good solution
is education: Demonstrate to your boss the kinds of improvements you can
make in their documents, and self-interest will do the rest. Once they see
what you can add to a document, they'll start asking you to do more. That's
where you start to acquire the respect of your peers, and the perks that
come with it.

<<I believe a strong case can and should be made that the technical editor
should be a highly skilled technical writer first, who also cultivates the
various editing-specific skills and who can serve as a mentor for new
writers.>>

That's a very pragmatic suggestion for the kind of environment in which the
company won't provide someone who does only editing. But editing and writing
are sufficiently different skills and have sufficiently different goals that
an editor should be _an editor_ first and foremost. Yes, the skillsets
overlap to a considerable degree, but not fully. A good editor is often a
good writer, but the reverse is true much less often in my experience.

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
(try ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca if you get no response)
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada

"Wisdom is one of the few things that look bigger the further away it
is."--Terry Pratchett

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