By Richard Hamilton | Member
I know the arguments for using a professional editor. I’ve made them myself. No one should edit his or her own work. Mistakes cost money. Customers will dismiss your product if your documents are poorly edited. None of these arguments holds water with most managers. Few corporate tech comm groups have dedicated editors, and that’s unlikely to change.
If you are one of the fortunate few who has an editor, treasure that person and don’t let your manager see this article. If you aren’t that fortunate, read on.
Successful self-editing requires action at every phase of your process, from planning to writing to editing. If you wait until you’re through writing to think about editing, you’ll waste time and effort, and the result will not be as good.
Planning Phase
From the day you start planning your writing project, you can take actions that will simplify your eventual editing efforts. The three keys to planning are selection, self-awareness, and structure.
Selection means you know your audience and write content for just that audience. Don’t explain bits and bytes to experienced system administrators and don’t explain the theory of computation to beginning programmers. Write only the content your audience needs. Because technical writers often want to explain a bit more, add interesting sidelights, and ensure that our audience gets the point, we tend to overwrite unless we plan carefully. Writing only what needs to be written reduces your editing load; you don’t need to edit content you haven’t written.
Self-awareness means you know your writing strengths and weaknesses and use that knowledge to write better content from the start so that you can later edit that content more efficiently. More on this topic later.
Structure gives you a framework that makes your content predictable and consistent. Predictable and consistent may not work in a novel, but they work in technical writing, both for your audience and for you. Even if you don’t use structured markup, you can still structure your content so that each type of content—procedures, concepts, reference material—follows a consistent model. You’ll simplify writing and editing.
Writing Phase
In the writing phase, the most important way to minimize your later edits is to start simple and stay simple. The simpler you write, the easier it will be to edit.
Which of these passages would you rather edit?
"The surrounding packing material should be retained so that in the event that you need to return the product you can use it for shipment."
"Keep the box in case you need to return the product."
If you’re editing the second sentence, you will waste no time adding commas, pruning verbiage, chasing antecedents, simplifying words, or converting passive voice to active. And if your content is translated, the lower your word count, the less your company pays.
Editing Phase
In most technical communication groups, you aren’t going to get much, if any, direct editing support. You will get a technical review and possibly an end-user review. Your best opportunity to get editing help is to engage fellow writers in some peer editing.
Technical and End-User Reviews
During technical reviews, you can’t expect and don’t want subject matter experts to edit your content for language usage. However, you should ask them to flag content they think may be hard to understand. If they have a hard time understanding what you’ve written, rewrite and try again. The same thing applies to end-user reviews if you are fortunate enough to have them.
Peer Editing
Peer editing means you collaborate with other writers to edit each other’s work. If you don’t have a peer-editing arrangement, start one. You may meet resistance. You may even resist yourself; after all, you and your fellow writers already have plenty to do. But peer editing doesn’t need to take a lot of time. To get the most from peer editing for the least effort, try these two tactics:
Ask peer editors to mark problems but not fix them. A good writer can almost always fix a problem once that problem has been pointed out, so don’t make your editors rewrite. They will work faster, and, as a bonus, you won’t get into disagreements over whose wording is better.
Ask peer editors to help you find your blind spots. Don’t ask any editor, especially a peer editor, to keep fixing the same problems over and over again. Instead, ask your editor to tell you about your blind spots, those grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes that you keep making but don’t see. Every writer has blind spots. Some matter more than others. Here are some that I consider important to watch for:
- Definitions: Do you misuse words, especially commonly confused pairs such as affect and effect? For example, do you "effect a change" or "affect a change"? If you’re not sure, open a tab in your browser, leave it pointed at a dictionary, and use it. If I’m even slightly unsure of the meaning of a word, I look it up.
- Rewording: Do you overuse synonyms? This leads to sentences such as, "Unpack the frimlitch and the plastic ties, then attach the product to the scrimlet using the fasteners." Are the fasteners the plastic ties or something else? Is the product the frimlitch? Your customers can guess, and they may get it right, but do you want them guessing when they’re wrangling a delicate frimlitch? It’s better to repeat a word than to replace it with a potentially ambiguous synonym.
- Antecedents: Do you have antecedent problems? For example, "When you insert the scrimlet in the socket, make sure it’s well grounded." What’s the it that should be grounded, the scrimlet or the socket? Don’t leave your reader guessing, or something—we don’t know what—may get zapped. Ambiguous antecedents can be hard for self-editors to notice because ambiguity is hard to identify in your own writing. To find antecedent problems, look at each pronoun and try to imagine everything it might refer to. If a pronoun could reasonably refer to more than one thing, you’ve found a problem.
- Passive voice: Do you overuse the passive voice? For example, "The frimlitch cleaning process is initiated by the scrimlet." Avoid passive voice when you can, but don’t obsess. Sometimes you must use passive voice, and other times it works better than active voice. For example, "Senator Blowhard was elected with a margin of ten points" is shorter and clearer than "The voters elected Senator Blowhard with a margin of ten points." Generally, though, sentences in passive voice are likely to be unnecessarily long, complex, and challenging to edit. Learn to recognize passive voice, and when you use it, use it intentionally.
- Word quirks: Do you overuse certain words? This might include overusing words like very or using favored words in an ambiguous context. For example, if you favor the word as, you can end up with a sentence like "Turn off the red switch as the propeller moves." Does this mean "turn off the switch because the propeller moves," "turn off the switch when the propeller begins to move," or "turn off the switch only when the propeller is moving"? If you’ve ever spent any time around propellers, you don’t want to guess. However, not all word quirks are equally bad. Most of the time it doesn’t matter if you use "like" when you should use "such as," or if you overuse "that."
- Repetition: Do you repeat phrases unnecessarily? For example, "Unpack the frimlitch and save the packing material and instructions when you unpack the product." This is a lesser offense, but I see it all the time. Once you are aware of this blind spot, it’s easy to find and fix.
- Distance: Do you leave too much distance between the verb and the subject, object, or prepositional phrase? For example, "Insert the frimlitch with the yellow side up and the purple side to the left carefully in the triangular socket." By the time they get to "in the triangular socket," your readers will have forgotten what the task is. And the strangely placed "carefully" doesn’t help. This sentence isn’t technically incorrect, but it is much harder to read than it could be. Try something like this instead: "Orient the frimlitch with the yellow side up and the purple side to the left, then carefully insert it into the triangular socket."
- Complicated sentence structure: Do you write sentences that are too long, have multiple dependent clauses, or use multiple parenthetical phrases? Does your writing contain a lot of semicolons, colons (except when introducing lists), dashes, parentheses, or commas? Heavy use of these punctuation marks is a sign that your style may be overly complex and, thus, harder to edit.
The better you understand your blind spots, the more problems you will catch and correct as you write, leaving yourself fewer edits to make later.
Self-Editing
Peer editing is good when you get it, but since peer editors are usually as busy as you are, the odds are you won’t get a thorough edit. You will need to self-edit. Here are some ideas for getting the most out of self-editing:
- Start with selection. Is everything there, and is it pitched at the right audience? What can you remove before you start editing?
- Look for your blind spots. Even if you catch a lot of problems as you write, you will still miss problems in your blind spots. Keep them in mind as you edit.
- Use a checklist. A checklist helps you focus on what’s important and keeps you from missing steps. Make your personal checklist by combining universal ideas (like selection and peer edits) with specific checks tailored to your company requirements, your style guide, and your writing blind spots.
- Don’t tweak, rewrite. When you find yourself spending 10-15 minutes trying to fix a sentence, stop. Set it aside, then come back later and rewrite it from scratch. There’s probably something fundamentally wrong that you don’t see. Instead of diving deeper into a series of tweaks, rewrite. In extreme cases, you may need to back up and redo a paragraph or even more. Even then, it’s often better, and quicker, to drop a losing cause and start anew.
- Use a different format. Print it out or display it in HTML on a wide screen, anything that puts it in a different form. You will see things you didn’t see in the original form.
- Let it sit for a while. This is hard when you’re on deadline, but if you can leave a project for a while, when you come back you will see your work from a fresh perspective that can reveal problems you didn’t see before. Set one project aside, work on another, then come back to the first. Sleep on it. Eat lunch (while reading a good book, of course).
- Read it aloud. If you can, read your text to someone else, or read it aloud to yourself. Like using a different format and letting your writing sit for a while, reading aloud gives you a different perspective that will help reveal problems.
- Read it backwards. An old proofreading trick, this technique especially helps with spelling, repeated words (the the), and homophones (to, two, too).
Let’s apply some selection to the editing process. What rules or conventions have lower priority? Don’t take this list as an excuse to ignore these things in most writing. But when you are under the gun and you have limited time to edit, here are some things that, in my opinion, could be given lower priority.
- Paragraphs: Don’t use too many very short or very long paragraphs, especially in a row. Otherwise, don’t worry too much about paragraph breaks unless a trusted editor says you’ve got a problem.
- Archaic rules: To scrupulously avoid split infinitives is a waste of time. And starting a sentence with a conjunction is fine, as is ending a sentence with a preposition if you want to.
- Strict parallel construction: If your writing is unambiguous, accurate, and you sometimes use nonparallel phrasing, the world will not end. Parallel structure is good, but if you don’t have time to fix a clear, nonparallel sentence, such as the previous one, don’t let it keep you up at night.
- Commas, sometimes: My first college English paper came back with an F and the note, "You write well, but you have no idea how to use commas." Since then, I have been inordinately sensitive to comma usage. Don’t go down that road. Learn the important rules, and don’t worry about the ones that are "case by case." The important ones are the ones that remove ambiguity. In my opinion, those include the Oxford comma and commas that separate an independent clause from a dependent clause. If you read your text carefully, and a comma doesn’t cause confusion, I wouldn’t worry about keeping it, or dropping it. For example, I think the previous sentence would be unambiguous with or without the first or third commas. I can see arguments for keeping or removing both.
- Widows, orphans, line breaks, and formatting in general: If you’re trying to install a frimlitch, you don’t care if the word "install" is hyphenated in the wrong place at the end of a line. Some writers are forced to deal with formatting, but with the exception of space-constrained documents such as quick reference cards or checklists, the details of typography and formatting have value, but edits that improve clarity have higher priority.
Conclusion
What does my advice boil down to? Carefully select what to write and what to leave out, learn where your blind spots are, create and use a checklist, get a fresh perspective whenever you can, and don’t sweat the small stuff.
Several of the points in this article came from a discussion on the TechWhirl mailing list (www.techwr-l.com/), especially the thoughts on using checklists and enlisting technical reviewers. Thanks to everyone who contributed. And thanks to Marcia Riefer Johnston, whose help editing this article is ample proof to me that good editors are priceless.
Richard Hamilton is the founder of XML Press, which creates publications for technical communicators, content strategists, content marketers, and engineers. Before starting XML Press in 2008, he worked in the computer industry as a software developer and documentation manager. Richard volunteers with the Tzu Chi Foundation, an international humanitarian organization. In his spare time, he enjoys playing the guitar and, occasionally, singing.
