Category: Skills

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Best of Corrigo: The Editor as Leader – How Expanding Your Role Can Boost Your Profession, Your Employer, and Your Career

(Originally published in 2000; republished with minor changes in 2019)

Marcy Pack

Whether you are a full-time editor or simply someone who believes in the importance of editorial vigilance, you have a lot to gain by becoming a visible leader. Even if you’re not in a supervisory position, taking an active role in stressing the value of high-quality editing can improve your company’s products, boost the reputation of the editing profession, and often provide some payoffs in your career as well.

Depending on your company’s environment, not all of the following suggestions will be appropriate for you. However, I hope you can glean some ideas about how to unleash your leadership potential.

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Four Questions for Considering the Needs and Circumstances of Our Audience

By Danielle Karr

A company must communicate with its customers; however, whether these communications are valuable to the audience is another question.

A company’s content is often influenced by the individuals who internally surround the document rather than the external target audience, which forces technical communicators to sometimes release content that does not accurately reflect or meet readers’ needs. This type of content creation process can lead companies to measure their content’s success by how it satisfies internal (often managerial) opinions rather than how well the document fulfills the content needs of the intended audience.

Luckily, technical editors have the power to correct this corporate messaging problem by championing readership interests, needs, and sensitivities during document creation and review process—safeguarding the audience from irrelevant, insensitive, or burdensome content.

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The Best of Corrigo: Setting Up an Editorial Review Process

By Sarah Barczyk
(originally published in 2009; updated with permission by Corrigo staff in 2018)

So you want to be a technical editor. You’re well-versed in grammar, style, punctuation, and the mechanics of the English language. You know what it takes to produce a clear, concise, readable paragraph and a coherent technical document.

Subject-matter experts within your company recognize that you’re an asset and routinely seek you out for writing help, and perhaps enlist your aid in editing large documents. But you know that so much more can be done. All you need is a process. It sounds so simple.

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