Editing at the Sentence Level Using the APost Method

APost is an abbreviation of the Latin term a posteriori, and its counterpart, APri editing, is an abbreviation of a priori, which underpins traditional copyediting and proofreading. APost editing is a novel editing method, a fusion of sentence-level editing and usability testing. After reviewing the premise of APost editing—based on both secondary research and observation—the presenter will enumerate the problems that APost editing addresses, provide specific ways to accommodate automaticity (such as signposting and unstringing noun strings), and discuss the viability of such an editing method given the constraints of budgets, deadlines, and the condition of the document to be edited. Attendees will take away a practical method of improving the readability of technical documents and ensuring that the sentences in technical documents are reader-ready.

The prevailing paradigm for the “levels of edit” includes three often-overlapping stages through which the consummate editor should proceed to achieve a nearly flawless, sturdy document: substantive editing, copyediting, and proofreading. This webinar proposes a new method of editing to ensure that a document’s sentences are reader-ready. Attendees will be asked to contribute to the development of this new method by providing feedback. With enough interest, the presenter will create a web space—such as a wiki—for collaboratively developing a formal method based on the ideas expressed during this webinar.During fluid reading, a typical reader dives headlong into the text and progresses rather carelessly at a speed and resulting level of understanding known as rauding—a portmanteau of reading and auding (auding is the process of comprehending spoken language). Readers engaged in rauding are unaware of the reading process. The technical term for this lack of awareness is automaticity, which applies to many human activities in addition to reading. An extreme example of automaticity is highway hypnosis, where a person drives a vehicle from one point to another without experiencing or recollecting the journey.

In this webinar, the presenter will:
1) Review reading behaviors that call for new ways of thinking about sentence-level editing.
2) Review the traditional levels of edit.
3) Provide examples of malformed sentences that impair fluid reading and that traditional editing may not detect.
4) Advance a proposed complement to the levels of edit that the presenter calls APost editing.