Tagged: editing

Articles on Technical Writing for International Audiences

I have been reading up on a lot of Technical Communication articles lately. Some (though not all) of the following articles address how to best approach writing for international audiences. Enjoy!

10 Tips for Writing International Technical Content by Michael Kriz

Color Meanings by Culture International Business Edge

10 Things You Can Do to Create Better Documentation by Alan Norton

Is “Intercultural” Communication a Moot Point? by Geoff Hart

Sensitivity to Other Cultures by Geoff Hart

The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors Search Engine Land

Style in Writing

I am working my way through Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams and Gregory G. Colomb. I would recommend it for anyone who makes writing or editing their profession. It is a thin little book with 264 pages in total (including Appendices, Glossary, and Index) with twelve lessons in five parts that address style, clarity, grace, clarity of form, and ethics. More quotes to come, I’m sure.

“The problem is, we cannot judge our own writing as others will because we respond less to the words on the page than to the thoughts in our minds. We can avoid that solipsistic subjectivity only if we can figure out how what we have put on the page makes our readers feel as they do.” p. 7

“A warning: if you think of the principles offered here as rules to follow as you draft, you may never finish anything. Most experienced writers get something down on paper or up on the screen as fast as they can. Then as they revise that first draft into something clearer, they understand their ideas better. And when they understand their ideas better, they express them more clearly, and the more clearly they express them, the better they understand them…and so it goes, ending only when they run out of energy, interest, or time.” p. 8

“If writers whom we judge to be competent regularly violate some alleged rule and most careful readers never notice, then the rule has no force. In those cases, it is not writers who should change their usage, but grammarians who should change their rules.” p. 18

“You can’t predict good grammar or correct usage by logic or general rule. You have to learn the rules one-by-one and accept the fact that some of them, probably most of them, are arbitrary and idiosyncratic.” p. 23

“We distinguish these two kinds of sentences because readers can respond to them very differently: the one you are now reading for example, is one long punctuated sentence, but it is not as hard to read as many shorter sentences that consist of many subordinate clauses; I have chosen to punctuate as one long sentence what I might have punctuated as a series of shorter ones: that colon, those semicolons, and the comma before that but could have been periods, for example–and that dash could have been a period too.” p. 211

Grammar Rules

Simply because we are editors, that does not mean we are, or should be, “grammar nazis.”

While I do get a laugh at those grammar arguments that sometimes get surprisingly heated, I find that I usually have a side. We can get into a whole descriptivist vs. prescriptivist argument. This quote, from the late Joseph M. Williams, pretty much sums up my feelings:

“If writers whom we judge to be competent regularly violate some alleged rule and most careful readers never notice, then the rule has no force. In those cases, it is not writers who should change their usage, but grammarians who should change their rules.” -Joseph M. Williams, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace.

Reference Books

A common topic brought up by editors regards what type of reference books to use. There are threads all over the internet (what can I say–editors can be pretty nerdy) with recommendations for reference books. Here are what I find to be the most popular:

DICTIONARY

  • Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate
  • American Heritage College
  • Random House Webster’s College
  • Webster’s New World

STYLE MANUAL

  • The Chicago Manual of Style
  • Words into Type
  • The New York Public Library Writer’s Guide to Style and Usage
  • Gregg Reference Manual
  • Associated Press Stylebook (used mostly by newspapers and magazines)
  • Modern Language Association (used mostly by writers in the humanities)

THESAURUS

  • Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms
  • Random House Webster’s College Thesaurus
  • Rodale’s Synonym Finder
  • Roget’s International Thesaurus

USAGE GUIDES

  • Dictionary of Modern English Usage
  • The Careful Writer: A Modern Guide to English Usage
  • Modern American Usage: A Guide
  • Fowler’s Modern English Usage (3d ed.)
  • Garner’s Modern American Usage (3d ed.)

EXTRA

  • Language Dictionaries
  • The Bible (you might have to pay attention to the various translations)
  • Barlett’s Familiar Quotations
  • The Copyeditor’s Handbook by Amy Einsohn

The Compulsive Editor

Excerpt from The Elements of Editing: A Modern Guide for Editors and Journalists by Arthur Plotnik (Macmillan, 1982)

Signs of a Dysfunctional (Editor-Related) Compulsiveness

  • Holding to favorite rules of usage, whatever the effect on communication
  • Musing for fifteen minutes on whether to use a hairline or one-point rule
  • Changing every passive construction to an active one
  • Concentrating on negative rather than positive space in layout

Signs of Functional (Reader-Oriented) Compulsiveness

  • Following up
  • Rewriting every headline that fails to motivate readership
  • Quadruple-checking of page proofs
  • Staring at type specifications a full ten seconds
  • Reading every word in its final context
  • As soon as one issue is put to bed, insisting that work begin on the next

Quotes on Editing

Quotes from Leslie T. Sharpe and Irene Gunther in Editing Fact and Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 1994)

“Editors can do harm primarily in two ways: when they alter an author’s individual style–her voice–or when they change the content or meaning of her prose. Doing no harm when editing a manuscript means doing the minimum necessary to clarify an author’s language or intent.”

“New editors, anxious to prove to their superiors that they have mastered the minutiae of grammar and usage, tend to overedit. But so, at times, do experienced editors, perhaps in an effort to validate the importance of their own function, or simply out of a failure to grasp what a writer is trying to accomplish.”

“Gratuitous editing and unnecessary rewriting are the most common complaints writers make about editors. And justifiably so. The editor’s job is to allow the author’s voice to emerge without coloring it, or replacing it with her own. An editor who wants to write should be a writer.”

“Editors are seen as the arbiters of taste, style, and usage, but good editors cannot be arbitrary. They must be flexible. Essentially what this means is that they listen: They never fail to take into account an author’s feelings.”