Eye for Editing: Learned or Innate?

We introduce another new guest blogger today, Paula Robertson. Paula's blog will explore the topic of editing—technical editing, editing as a skill, practical tips, personal stories, and whatever tangent that might lead to. She hopes to engage you in discussion and thought to answer the question, “Do you have an Eye for Editing?”

Is editing a learned or innate skill? I think the answer is “both.”

Let’s say that you can break the skill of editing into three skill or ability levels:

1. The ability to notice when something in a text is not “right.”
2. The ability to know what to do to make it right.
3. The ability to explain to someone else in an effective way how they can make it right.

I see these as progressive, cumulative skills. I submit that some of us are just born with skill number 1, and that would be me.

In looking back on my technical communication career, I realized that I enjoyed editing, and probably was an editor of sorts, long before I embraced writing. Somewhere along the way to my college English classes, I developed a dread of writing under pressure. I had always made As in English through grade school. But the terrifying time constraints of those essays in college class netted me a D on a mid-term paper, for which I was able to write only my name and a single sentence. Only the research paper written outside class salvaged a B grade for me that time. And when I walked out of my next and last English requirement, I thought I was done with the pressure of writing!

I was not an English or Journalism major, and there was no such thing as technical writing curricula at the time. No matter to me, because I earned my degree in fine arts. Why then did I take a job as a secretary after graduation? So I could finally move away from home, silly! But my boss had an eighth-grade education, and more than once he would write something, then give it to me and say, “Here, make this sound like the King’s English.” I had no problem in doing that, and thank goodness he realized that “secretorial” skill in me.

In doing research for a book about my career journey to technical communication, I realized that first job was my first professional experience in “technical” editing. Okay, not so technical. It was also my first opportunity to do print design and layout before there was such a thing as desktop publishing. But that’s another story.

It has always been incredibly easy for me to spot typos, punctuation and capitalization errors, and faulty grammar constructions. So easy that I say “typos find me,” much to my distress. Do you know how much easier it would be to go through life without noticing all these assaults on my sense of decency and order? Restaurant menus, road signs, so many objects of daily living all flaunt their insults!

But this is the “gift” I’ve been given. And so knowingly or not, I’ve found ways to use it, to share it in my work long before landing in technical communication. Where others only sought to format text, I dared to edit it. No one asked or expected me to, I just couldn’t not edit.

How about you? Let me know your thoughts as we begin to explore how editing is so much more than a three-item list of abilities, whether developed or innate, and so much more than being chased by tyrannical typos.

Paula Robertson has been in technical communication for a long time or longer, depending on how you choose to define it. No matter what her current job title, she likes to call herself the “Insightful Editor.” In STC, her current job title is judge manager for the 2013-14 International Summit Awards.