Feline Musings

“This is the original piece of the article that appeared in the April volume of TechCraft, a newsletter of the yahoo group – Technical Writers India (TWI). It was slightly modified for TechCraft.”

Many members of the technical communications fraternity fret over their career progression, especially when managerial positions are few and in the passing. If involved in such a discussion, I usually assert that the next logical step for a technical writer or author is to become a technical editor or reviewer. I take this stand by reflecting on two prominent aspects: firstly, the significance of review and editing for quality deliverables in documentation, and secondly, the recognition of reviewing and editing as a competency that is developed and enhanced over a period of time.

I believe that the field of technical review and editing is not only professionally rewarding but also adds immense value-add to technical documentation. It is a benchmark for a writer’s maturity and competency, and also a position of immense responsibility. Contrary to popular myth, editing is not only about marking corrections, or fault-finding; it is about total involvement in a documentation assignment, including planning, collaborating and defining best practices.

A brief overview of the responsibilities of a technical editor includes:
Planning:

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  • Understanding the aim and audience of a documentation assignment
  • Planning a documentation assignment including styles, standards (editorial policy), templates, content, table of content, and approach
  • Defining the review strategy, such as creating review checklists and defect log templates
  • Identifying technical, functional and peer reviewers

Collaborating:

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  • Coordinating efforts and activities of all the reviewers and collating various review comments
  • Mentoring new technical writers to bring them up-to-mark with the existing documentation team
  • Ensuring adherence to the defined “editorial policy
  • Maintaining stringent timelines

Writing:

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  • Writing for the product
  • Restructuring content, making it more readable and organized

Editing:

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  • Undertaking editing tasks such as checking grammar, general word usage, and spelling, and language-based edits

Reviewing:

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  • Checking technical and functional accuracy of the content (in consultation with a SME, or by referring to the collated review comments of the technical and functional reviewers)
  • Document Testing

Analyzing:

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  • Preparing best practices document based on the defect logs
  • Analyzing defect logs and preparing strategies for reducing defects and improving the document quality

The planning, collaborating and analyzing responsibilities provide on-the-job training for a documentation manager’s role. It opens one’s perspective to challenges of good documentation, the need and pressure of working with various stakeholders within specified deadlines, collating and analyzing data to generate appropriate metrics, and most importantly, accountability for the quality of a deliverable.

With regard to the responsibility of writing, remember there is nothing that stops a technical editor from getting involved in the actual writing process. In fact, a good technical editor can be a fine mentor by virtue of his or her own deliverables. Many technical writers get promoted to editorial and reviewer roles and their greatest asset is the knowledge of a particular product or domain and hence, they can immensely contribute to a document by writing the descriptive sections or adding to the information provided by the writer.

The challenge in the current industry scenario is to recognize the significance of technical editing and reviewing. Documentation teams have to move from self-review and peer-review based methodologies to a more professional approach where technical editing is developed as a competency. Organizations, which want to witness serious and substantial growth in their technical documentation portfolio, should focus on creating a level for technical editors in their designation-competency matrix.

Talking in terms of challenges, there is another that waylays the path of the enthusiastic technical editor or reviewer – resistance from within the documentation team. It is a bare fact that not many people are open to scrutiny and defect-identification in their writing. Most technical writers are used to working independently, and as typical to writers of all genres, deem what they have written as correct, precise and comprehensible. With due respect to all technical writers, the other bare fact is that we all make mistakes!

If you are a technical writer, you cannot deny that there are times when you revisited a document and caught a little mistake here and a tiny glitch there, or just muttered under your breath, “I wish I had more time to self-review this document, but for that ghastly deadline ….!” It is here that a technical editor can be your knight in shining armor and help you eliminate oversight, improve the usability and quality of documents and also provide you a handy reminder of errors and mistakes that you can easily eliminate in your next deliverable. You remain in-charge of your document with the safeguard of professional edit and review. The better your track record as a technical writer, the sooner your chances of becoming the technical editor or reviewer for a documentation team!

On the whole, successful editing is dependent on the organization’s culture and the editor’s relationship with the writer. The organization’s culture can provide status, authority and a progressive growth path to a technical editor or a reviewer. Collaborative team spirit shared with the technical writer(s) provides motivation to the editor, and supports the symbiotic relationship between the writer and the editor. The ends define the means, and whether it is the writer or the editor, the true stalwart of technical documentation has only one aim – to deliver the right information to the right people in the right way!

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