ystrimling, Author at STC Technical Editing SIG

September 1, 2022

Of Interest: Editing for Leaner Modern Content Webinar

As a TechComm editor, you often work with old legacy content that is overly formal, poorly structured, and contains unnecessary information.

Your challenge is to reduce complexity and remove unnecessary content to improve the user experience. But how do you get started?

On 8 September 2022 at 10 AM ET (for
your local time zone, go to https://bit.ly/3KHn0A1), join renowned speaker Leah Guren to learn:

Why fluff is so bad
Why lean content is a future-proof TechComm skill
How to identify common forms of fluff
How to edit aggressively
How to think creatively to solve structure problems
…and more!

To order tickets for this webinar, go to: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/editing-for-leaner-modern-content-tickets-387978854197

August 25, 2022

Eye for Editing: The Editor as Teacher

Editor’s Note: A version of this article was originally published in the STC Notebook in 2014 as part of a series. To make it easier for you to find these articles again in the future, they are tagged with the Eye for Editing tag, and the titles prefaced with the same phrase.

Author's Note: This is the last article (that currently exists) in this Eye for Editing series. It has been fun to revisit my thoughts from the “first edition” in STC Notebook to find that most, if not all of it, still holds true to the editing experience. 
Do you have an idea for a follow-up article that you’d like to publish in Corrigo? Would you like to put together your answers to my questions for others to read? Submit your ideas and articles to the Corrigo editor at editor@stc-techedit.org.  And you are welcome to contact me any time to keep the conversation going

By Paula Robertson

How do you think of yourself in your editing role? Is each document, article, topic, or book by the same author or team of writers an isolated editing task? Does each task seem to start from scratch as if you’d not edited that author’s work before? Or does each subsequent edit you deliver build on your previous suggestions and comments? Do subsequent documents indicate that the writer “got it the first (or last) time”?

July 28, 2022

Eye For Editing: Do Not Edit…

Editor’s Note: A version of this article was originally published in the STC Notebook in 2014 as part of a series. Over the course of 2022, we hope to publish more of these articles. To make it easier for you to find these articles again in the future, they will be tagged with the Eye for Editing tag, and the titles prefaced with the same phrase.

By Paula Robertson

Just because you can. Please, do not mark something for the author to change just to prove your superior knowledge of seldom-used symbols.

You wouldn’t do something like this, would you? In the throes of final review to meet a draft document deadline, please don’t waste the author’s time—the author who is already stressed and has worked many overtime hours to meet the deadline—by demanding revisions that no one but you will notice. You will get your chance later, but at this stage, please resist the urge to point out every tiny flaw that presents itself.

Because it’s just not important. And does more harm than good. The readers of the draft won’t care; your writer will. Is it worth it?

July 11, 2022

A Little Humor: Know a Good Editing Joke?

Technical editing is no joke! And there are so many funny examples of what happens when editors are left out altogether (or, gulp, when we fail to catch a mistake).

We want to hear your humorous personal editing stories or a good editing joke!

You can:

Tweet them to @stc_te_sig, using the hashtag #TechEditNoJoke.
Email them to sigleaders@stc-techedit.org, using the subject line #TechEditNoJoke.
Post them to our #sig-technical-editing channel on the STC Communities Slack space, using the hashtag #TechEditNoJoke.
Note: This will only work if you are an STC member. To join the STC Slack space, see the instructions at https://www.stc.org/membership/slack/.

You just might win a prize later this year! 😉

June 30, 2022

Eye for Editing: Caught Between Two Edits

By Paula Robertson

Once upon a time, I found myself in an interesting position. I had a freelance client for which I did editing exclusively. I also had a full-time contract gig where my job descriptors were writer, editor, designer, trainer, developer, project manager… My deliverables were primarily original content as a writer, and editorial reviews of the original content of my writer peers, on a team of three.