I have been beyond busy at work these past few weeks. Apparently once it gets out that you're competent, it's all over. Since the work has become steady I've found it is necessary to have a process. I need to have a certain way to approach a document in order to hit all the key points before throwing it over to the next person in line who looks at it.
As a tech writer I have two main responsibilities: to format and to edit. When an outsider or even the author or the document thinks about it, he or she immediately concludes the most important part of my jobs is editing the atrocious writing. Yes, that is important. But I have found what is more important is to put the document in a presentable, professional format. Some of these documents come to me grossly mis-formatted and some not at all. As a government contract we need to present professional, unified looking documents. I think that is a top priority. We should not be turning out sloppy products. I don't think anyone really wants to do that. So I've decided that formatting, applying the template and making sure all the necessary pieces and parts are included in a given document are there is my number one priority.
I think the misconception about being an editor is that you get to rewrite things-you don't. As a tech editor you cannot change content. In fact, most of the time I struggle to fix grammar and at times punctuation because I am unsure of the technical terms. My thought on the "editing" portion is that you can and have to control what you can control. There are times you have to cut your loses and take what you can get, excuse the expressions and cultural references. I think many people expect a certain level of correctness (or lack there of) from scientists, engineers and the like and those authors are cut a break. There is only so much you can do in an 80 page document. If you change one chunk of text to sound perfect, it isn't consistent with the other 1000 pieces that follow. I've found picking and choosing what makes a coherent, presentable, visually appealing, comprehensive document is the way to go. And if I can find a way to produce such a document effectively then I know I'll be a tech writer and editor!
1 comment:
Your discussion here is really good and would make for a good description/analysis to include in the reflective essay of your portfolio. As you do so, however, you'll want to present specific examples or, if you can't include examples because of confidentiality agreements, at least detailed descriptions of decisions you made and explanation/analysis of why you made them. For example, you say that you have to decide "where to cut your losses." In your reflective essay you would provide an example of a specific document in which you decided to cut your losses, what "cutting your losses" actually meant in this context, and why you made this specific decision. Similarly, I like your discussion about formatting texts. In your reflective essay, you'd want to talk through some specific examples -- what did the text look like when you received it, what were the specific problems with its format (vis-a-vis the document's audience and rhetorical goals), and what formatting decisions did you make and why?
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