Category: Editing

Mar 29

Come to the Summit to Gain a Technical Edge

Here is your guide to a few of the exciting technology and development topics at STC’s Summit- including the Internet of Things, API documentation, video strategies, content for mobile devices and augmented reality, analytics for big data, tools like Jekyll and GitHub, and code samples for Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby.

Mar 23

Eye for Editing: Levels of Edit

I’m stating the obvious when I say that there are many systems that define levels of edit. Some systems define up to nine levels or categories of edit, such as the well-known, pioneering effort to define levels of edit by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But when I started in my current role as editor for a team of K–12 curriculum writers, I implemented a personally derived system of four levels, which are based on the book Technical Editing, The Practical Guide for Editors and Writers, by Judith A. Tarutz (1992). This is also the system I’ve used when proposing and scoping freelance editing projects. My system includes the following levels of edit: Developmental, Substantive, Literary, and Pre-release. Except for Developmental, these levels build on each other, starting with Pre-release at the lowest level.

Oct 27

Eye for Editing: The Editor as Teacher

How do you think of yourself in your editing role? Is each document, article, topic, or book by the same author or team of writers an isolated editing task? Does each task seem to start from scratch as if you’d not edited that author’s work before? Or is each subsequent edit you deliver informed by your previous suggestions and comments? Do subsequent documents indicate that the writer “got it the first (or last) time”?