Author: ystrimling

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This Worked for Me: How Do You Want That Edited?

By Yoel Strimling

While technical editors might be great, most of us aren’t miracle workers. We have deadlines, resource issues, multiple tasks, and so on. While we want the documents we send to our readers to be as good as they can be, we realize that we can’t do everything, and that some sort of compromise needs to be made. The “golden triangle” of Good/Cheap/Fast calls on us to pick only two.

So what do we do? We have to let the document authors (be they technical communicators or engineers) know exactly what we can do and how long it will take us, and then help them plan accordingly. When everybody is “on the same page” and all expectations are clear, the editing process runs much smoother.

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New Feature: Newbies’ Corner!

As the official publication of the STC Technical Editing SIG, Corrigo is full of useful information for technical editing practitioners.

But a lot of it is written by old fogies who have been in the business for many years.

Wouldn’t it be great to hear some new, fresh voices, especially from those who are studying the field or just starting out?

To provide a platform for new ideas and thoughts about our chosen profession, we are introducing a new feature – Newbies’ Corner!

This new feature will present articles written by technical editing students and aspiring, newly minted technical editing practitioners.

To make it easier for you to find these articles again in the future, they will be tagged with a Newbies’ Corner tag, and the titles prefaced with the same phrase.

If you are a student learning about technical editing or just starting out on your technical editing journey, and would like to submit an article, please send an email to editor@stc-techedit.org and let’s discuss it.

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License to Edit: Techniques for Technical Editing Success

By Ann Marie Queeney

The exciting exploits of James Bond may seem far removed from the field of technical editing. However, after reading a book titled, The Man with the Golden Typewriter: James Bond’s Letters I recognized that Ian Fleming––the creator of the iconic spy series––was a disciplined writer whose commitment to clear, sharp writing and accuracy shares many similarities with good technical editing practices.

This article draws upon the mentioned book’s witty and insightful letters between Fleming and his editing team at Jonathan Cape (his publisher), friends, and Bond fans to discuss good editing practices. 

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Conversation Starter: The Joys of Teaching Engineers to Write

By Christa Bedwin

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in April 2016, so it is part of the Best of Corrigo series. However, based on the interest in a similar article, I decided to republish it as a Conversation Starter as well.
It has been updated for 2020.

After twenty years of editing science, research, education, and engineering documentation, some of my favorite people to edit for are engineers. This baffles some of my fellow editors, who find engineers confusing or complicated to work with, and so I began to teach courses on how to navigate editing with engineers, and with engineering content. (I also teach courses for engineers to learn to write better.)

I am always delighted to discuss this topic further – please feel free to write to me! I’m easy to find on the Internet.

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