8.2: Overview of technical editing

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Tiffani Reardon, Tammy Powell, Jonathan Arnett, Monique Logan, & Cassie Race
Kennesaw State University

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You may find that technical editing is very different from what you expect. When people hear the word "edit," they think of rewriting an author's words; working with authors on issues such as character plot, and storyline; suggesting the most appropriate word in order to make a manuscript "sing." That's not technical editing.

Instead, technical editing is a highly rhetorical, detail-oriented process of ensuring that specialized information appears so that it is appropriate for end users, and technical editors make informed, thoughtful suggestions for improvement toward that purpose.

Technical editing is a collaborative process with authors, who are often subject-matter experts (SMEs, pronounced "smees"), to check correctness of such things as chemical formulas, specialized terminology, equations, and matchups between textual and visual elements, as well as more traditional aspects of writing.

Technical editing is a recursive process, not a one-and-done routine. Technical editors often review the same materials multiple times and have their edits reviewed before the materials are printed or posted online. Only rarely will technical editors make changes and then publish the materials immediately.

Technical editing covers a surprisingly wide variety of subjects, contexts, and materials. Job ads for technical editors seek people who can comment on—and create new—paper documents, electronic documents, images, visual designs, websites, audio and video files, and multimedia presentations, just to name a few examples.

This chapter will focus on editing text on hard copy, soft copy, and websites, but it will also provide you with concepts and techniques that you can use in graphics-heavy and multimedia editing tasks.