Wednesday, March 18, 2009
12-2pm (Eastern Daylight Time)
TE SIG and Washington DC Chapter
Primary Contact: Meredith Kinder, TE SIG - Email
Secondary: Carolyn Klinger, DC Chapter - Email
Providing Effective Editing Comments
Presenters: Michelle Corbin and Paula Cross
As technical editors, we must communicate effectively with writers so that they can easily implement changes in the information that we are editing. In addition to the editing markup, we use comments and queries to recommend how to improve the quality of the information. In this session, we present a thorough set of guidelines, each with specific examples, for how technical editors can provide effective comments and queries as part of an edit. After defining the different types of comments, we present guidelines for how to word comments (their tone), what you include in your comments (the content), and how you present your comments (their style). We conclude by recommending ways to summarize and present your comments and queries to the writers.
Michelle Corbin is a Senior Technical Editor and Information Architect at IBM. She has been a technical communicator for 20 years, with the past 12 years being spent as a technical editor. She is an Associate Fellow of STC, and is currently the Managing Editor of Corrigo, the newsletter for the Technical Editing SIG of STC.
Paula Cross is an advisory software engineer and a technical editor for IBM. She has 24 years experience as a software developer, and as an information developer, both as a writer and an editor. Paula resides in Santa Fe, NM.