A Quick Note About BChS

BChS is an extension of our contract-please don't ask me what it stands for because it escapes me now-that is based out of Ohio. We work together along the same vein and cooperate on some aspects especially in terms of documentation. Recently their tech writer quit (around the same time I started), so the BChS team had quite a few documents needing attention. I spent a good deal of time going through the documents looking for inconsistencies in general; these include format, spelling, graphics, usage, numbering, etc., and then I turned to incomplete content and grammar, all the while making notes on the text for the author and myself before making any real changes in our software. I learned a hard lesson during the two weeks I worked on these 15 SDF docs aka Software Development Folder documents, it is very hard to convince an author or other technical minded person of a change. It didn't seem to matter how many notes I made, how many times I circled the same error in a document or offered suggestions or even suggested the sentence be read out loud (to understand how ungrammatical it was), it's a hard sell. I know if I really believe in a change or I am against a comment I can use my knowledge of grammar rules to "argue my way out of it" or "convince" an author if necessary but that is yet another lesson of the working world I've learned.

I find that a bit ironic though...that if one takes such pride and ownership of his or her writing, documentation and creations, why would s/he not want it to be as clean and spotless as possible? I am simply here to help you. Editors make an author look good. They make a product look good, right? That's the goal of the contract.