How To for Employees
One of the most rewarding comprehensive editing projects I worked on was a how to guide for employees of FiT Publishing who needed to work on the eBook system. Sometimes, the customer will run into difficulties with the system, and these cheat sheets are supposed to help the employee help the customer. They were written by a fellow employee, and this is the first one I was given to work on.
I moved information that I thought would be important to the beginning and tried to cut down on some information that was repeated (like the login information). I also sometimes broke up steps and moved relevant information further up in the document. In my technical writing class, we had a unit on instructions, and I remember being told things like “give your reader feedback” (e.g., “If this happens…” or “This should happen next”). I tried to change the language to be more like that, and to break up the steps more to make them easier to follow.
This was a really great project for me to work on since I did have an entire unit on writing instructions. It was also my first project with a lot of control over the document. It was educational in that I learned to maneuver social interactions in the workplace more and that I could directly put into practice things I learned in my professional writing and editing courses.
Flier for Global Sport Book
Another comprehensive editing project I was involved in was more collaborative. My supervisor and I worked on a flier for an upcoming book. We discussed things like diction, syntax and where important information should go.
We discussed where to put the information on forewords the most. It was originally part of the block at the bottom, and we were trying to figure out how to best phrase it. But then my supervisor mentioned that she and another employee had been talking about moving it up to be its own section. And I suggested that would be a good idea, since it sort of got lost at the end of the paragraph and the authors of the foreword seemed to be something she was really interested in getting across to her audience.
This was educational because it was one of my first working “group projects.” I’ve heard in class a million times that group work in classes is so great because that’s what you’ll be doing in the real world. But this group project in particular was better than a lot of my in-class experiences, because my supervisor and I are both nerdily into grammar and the sort of stuff we were talking about in our brainstorming session. I learned not just how to phrase suggestions when working on a document with my supervisor, but also how different that experience can be in work compared to in class.
Conference Program
Another comprehensive editing project I worked on was a program for an upcoming conference. This is still in the works, but since I’d recently been to a conference when I was assigned the project, I asked what sort of layout they were considering doing for the program. I’ve been to a few conferences, and I knew that I had sort of ruthlessly picked apart conference programs in the past, so I was wondering if I could maybe help this program work for its audience better.
My supervisor said we had quite a bit of control and asked for my feedback. We decided to go with a design where the schedule of the presentations is in the front with just the titles and authors of the presentations as well as the room they’re presenting in in the schedule along with the page number of the abstracts, which would be further back (e.g., “10am: “The Study of [Something] in Sport” by Authors in room 105. p. 12″ would go in the schedule).
The abstracts in the back would also contain the information like room number and time.
I also did a lot of copyediting in these abstracts, but the comprehensive editing was the more rewarding part and the part that sticks out more.
I learned, again, interpersonal things from this experience, and that I should bring up my ideas when I have them, because my supervisor was really receptive to my thoughts and really interested in the ideas I brought to the table.
Kiersten Woods 