By Ron Stanley | Member
Editing in a collaborative environment can be a nightmare. You can spend hours adding commas after subordinate clauses only to have someone else spend hours deleting them “because my ninth grade English teacher told me not to use too many commas.” Okay, no one actually said that to me—that’s what makes it a nightmare and not reality.
Communication is critical in a workplace where large numbers of people work on the same document multiple times. Where I work, the production schedule for a single online course is a complex spreadsheet that takes up many pages. Most of our courses are published “just in time.” Meeting deadlines and staying within the budget are overriding concerns. Duplicate work can wreck the schedule as well as the bottom line—and it can cause frustration and a loss of confidence in your colleagues.
That’s why I’ve had to step out of my comfort zone as the quiet comma fixer and become a more vocal advocate in team meetings. A big part of my job as editor—a part that doesn’t appear on any job description—is to make sure that everyone on my team is aware of and agrees on matters like formatting, style, and boilerplate text. That means I have to speak up in meetings, keep in touch with team members via email and IM, and help build a consensus that everyone can live with.
And consensus is hard. You have to be confident enough to speak up. You have to be flexible enough to compromise. You have to be willing to say, “I disagree, but in the interest of getting this consistent, and getting it done on time, let’s do it your way.”
You also need the tools to educate the others on your team about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. You need to be patient enough to explain the in-house editorial style without seeming dismissive of your teammates’ work. You need to be able to build trust with your team members so they’re willing to listen to you. And you have to have a sense of humor about yourself.
Those skills don’t always come naturally to someone who’s used to toiling away in solitary confinement with only a Chicago Manual of Style for company. Communications professionals, oddly enough, aren’t necessarily good at communicating. We’re aces with the written language, but we’re not always so great at hashing out differences of opinion in a meeting with 10 other people. Or shooting a quick IM to the content specialist to check a math formula. Or putting together a 10-minute presentation on 10 things the writers can do to reduce corrections.
But what makes my job challenging is also what makes it fun. If I’m willing to step outside the comfortable but rather small box of copyediting, I don’t have to be just the guy who fixes the commas. I can also be the guy who watches out for everyone else, who helps the visual designers understand what the rest of the team wants them to do, who makes sure no one puts in those odd characters that make our systems choke and give our information specialists fits, who figures out what the content specialists and instructional designers really want and shows them how to make it better.
I’m blessed with a good team. No one feels proprietary about his or her area of expertise. Everyone knows I’m the expert at semicolons. But they’re also willing to listen to my opinions about visuals, content, instructional design, and workflow. And they’re patient and compassionate enough to explain to me in clear, concise language why—sometimes—I’m wrong.
By the same token, I may get final say over the commas, but I don’t get the only say over the commas. I have to be open to anyone else on the team questioning the editorial style. And every once in a while, someone makes a good catch. When that happens, it’s nice to know my team members have my back.
