By Avon J. Murphy | Fellow
If you’re a technical writer who has access to an editor’s services, you can take steps to nurture your relationship with your editor. Regardless of whether you’re beginning your career or have years of experience, here are a few pointers from an editor who’s had the privilege of helping writers improve thousands of documents.
Remember the Big Picture
Let’s begin with the principle that underlies the writer-editor relationship: we are colleagues who bring different skills into play as we strive to achieve a common goal. The technical writer researches technologies in depth, gives coherent shape to documents, and creates sentences and paragraphs that convey supporting details. The editor brings another perspective on the work in progress in the form of evaluation and recommendations. As different as our roles may be, we share responsibility for the success of our communications with our audience. We are collaborating.
If you’re a writer just beginning to learn the trade, you’ve perhaps heard stories about people like me. Editors relish their role of punishing you, view you as an underling who must obey all editorial commands to meet production schedules, think they know more than you, and try to replace your thinking with theirs. If you’re a seasoned pro, you’ve perhaps encountered an editor or two who indeed acted this way.
You might like to hear a professional secret: any editor who acts like that is a jerk. If I made your life impossible, I wouldn’t be doing my job, I wouldn’t deserve to edit your writing, and I wouldn’t get much work. A good editor respects the technical writer’s thoughts and contributions and, as a fellow professional and colleague, expects the same from the technical writer.
Maintain Communication
We can’t achieve our goals if we don’t communicate. I worked with an engineer who had been given his first technical lead position and was charged with delivering a substantial report on a new technology, for which I provided him a template. Clues of something wrong began popping up at once. My routine requests for updates and early research data were answered by silence, and the engineer was suddenly unavailable for consultation. I had no idea of what he was accomplishing or how to help him. His manager and I finally learned that he felt insecure about putting his thoughts into words and had done nothing beyond doing the research. A little communication from him now and then would have made our partnership successful.
A good editor makes sure you understand the scope of the project before we launch it, describing the schedule we need to observe, referring you to a style guide and other resources, letting you know whenever help is needed with the technical details, and providing specific feedback on what you submit. In turn, a good technical writer communicates with the editor whenever writing help is needed, when a subject matter expert provides new technical information that helps with the editing process, or when unforeseen circumstances make it impossible for you to meet a deadline.
Keep Your Expectations Realistic
An editor’s response to your prose varies depending upon the type of editing being done at a given point in the project, the time available, the budget, the number of other clients the editor has, and other factors.
I most enjoy developmental editing, because here I can use my creativity in tandem with your creativity to come up with the optimal approach and structure. We usually begin with an outline and, after give and take, the technical writer sends me revisions of the outline as well as exploratory drafts. I usually ask lots of questions about strategy and overall order of sections, and I provide examples of revised outlines and document-wide recommendations. But you will see very few words about your mechanics at this point. What we’re doing is laying a foundation upon which you can build the project.
Expect a different response when an editor copyedits your document. At this stage, we’re putting our minds together to clarify meaning, to ensure that our readers have the best combination of words, pictures, and (sometimes) video to understand our message. You will get recommendations to change wording, insert new paragraphs and artwork, and delete or move passages, and I ask such questions as, "Can you explain this in simpler terms?" and "Does this phrasing do the job?" We’re now working at the chapter, paragraph, and word level.
When proofreading, an editor checks for such mechanical production issues as widows and orphans or unintentional changes in font size. Your document is out of your hands by this point, so you won’t get communication from me about further changes.
Deal Responsibly with Editorial Feedback
What should you do when you get your document back with comments and suggested changes? Begin by looking carefully at what the editor has done. If you don’t understand something, let me know immediately. Once I’ve clarified my remarks, you can return to your work with added confidence.
One thing I don’t want you to do is to ignore my comments! This has happened to me only once, and I don’t relish the memory. I was the sole developmental editor and copyeditor for a skilled writer who was in turn the sole author on a new online documentation system. Although she clearly had learned the technology and could write, my experienced eyes noted several clusters of topics that were repetitive and an alarming number of paragraphs that violated company guidelines on acceptable phrasing. I don’t know whether she even read my files. She informed me that she was the author and would not change a word. Our product manager would not accept the unrevised writing, and we made the changes without the writer’s further input.
Up to a point, that author was right. The written product is essentially yours—you’ve generated the content, you’ve put a great deal of concentrated work into shaping your sentences, and your name usually appears on it. If I appear to be off-base in my interpretation or advice, by all means don’t be afraid to hold your ground and show me why your wording will work better than mine, or possibly we can hammer out a third approach. This kind of give and take can be stimulating and often produces stronger writing than either of us originally envisaged. So yes, your writing is yours. It’s also ours and, in some cases, it is proprietary to the company for which you work.
Needless to say, I expect you to do your homework before sending me drafts. The new version in my inbox should reflect your response to everything I noted in my earlier edited versions through your accepting and rejecting changes, answering my direct questions, posing questions of your own, and perhaps adding new material. Don’t expect an editor to rewrite; this is your job. Also, if you’ve tapped into new research for your revision, please send links to the sources. Happily, nearly every professional writer I’ve worked with has rewarded me with improvements in our documents and has made my work easier.
Respect Deadlines
I’ll talk about deadlines only briefly. I’ve been an editor for several technical book publishers and software firms, all of which maintain streamlined schedules to get accurate information to readers ahead of the competition. In these environments, if you don’t respond to edits by the deadlines, the schedule slips for everyone down the line from indexers to production staff to the marketing department. The financial repercussions can be severe. As I’ve said earlier, always tell your editor early on if anything happens that might endanger meeting a deadline.
Work with the Team’s Technology
Our partnership works best when you master two types of software tools. The first is the set of revision tracking features embedded within the software we’re using to prepare and circulate documents. Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Apple Pages, Adobe Acrobat, and other applications make it easy for authors and editors to see each other’s comments and textual alterations. An editor feels more at ease if the author has mastered the tracking features that we depend on to communicate our thinking about your prose. If you are a contractor or freelancer, know at least the procedures to follow in Word, which is used in most workplaces. You’ll streamline our work on a file if, after we’ve agreed on all changes, you can prepare a clean version by finding and clicking the Show Markup button, selecting Comments and the other options to make all markup visible, reviewing the markup one last time, and finally accepting all changes and deleting all comments.
You also need to be aware of how we keep records for our projects. An editor may expect a technical writer to be able to enter data into a simple spreadsheet or a calendaring application, such as Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook. You might also have to learn version control software, such as Visual SourceSafe. I’ve observed that technical writers quickly become familiar with such software on the job, so you should have no problem.
Help Your Editor Find True Happiness
I hope that each of us can experience a moment during our professional lives when every element coalesces in absolute perfection. It happened for me several years ago when I was developmental editor and copyeditor for the sole writer of print documentation for a new operating system. The technical writer was a marvel to work with:
- We quickly negotiated and agreed to the conditions of our partnership, including daily email updates on our progress and turnaround times of no more than two days on all drafts, revisions, and editorial comments.
- She apprised me of her progress every day and responded quickly when I emailed her questions.
- At our weekly face-to-face meetings, she not only elaborated on responses to my comments but also brought up areas for discussion that I hadn’t thought of.
- Her revisions were always in my inbox well before her deadlines.
- At the end of our contract, she thanked me for making her a better writer. She likewise made me a better editor by challenging me to write editorial comments that were easy to understand, taking a deep interest in the reasoning behind my editorial decisions, and increasing my confidence that a writer could indeed learn from my editing.
I thought I’d died and gone to editorial heaven! Of course, not every writer-editor relationship works out this well, but we can always strive to make it happen. As long as you and I do our parts, we just might get there.
Avon J. Murphy (avonmu@comcast.net) is a technical editor in western Washington. A retired college professor and government writer, he is an STC Fellow, a contractor, and the principal in Murphy Editing and Writing Services, specializing in computer and Web technologies. Avon served as book review editor for Technical Communication for 17 years. His most recent book is New Perspectives on Technical Editing (2010).
