What I think about when I edit (2019)
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What I think about when I edit (2019)
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Re: What I think about when I edit (2019)
#2[deleted]
Re: What I think about when I edit (2019)
#3> Don’t use adverbs
Re: What I think about when I edit (2019)
#4Any other engineers trying to improve their writing skills? Any additional resources or tips to help me refine my drafting and editing process?
Re: What I think about when I edit (2019)
#5Any other engineers trying to improve their writing skills? Any additional resources or tips to help me refine my drafting and editing process?
[deleted]
Re: What I think about when I edit (2019)
#6Any other engineers trying to improve their writing skills? Any additional resources or tips to help me refine my drafting and editing process?
Anything by Diana C. Reep. Technical Writing: Principles, Strategies, and Readings is particularly insightful:
Re: What I think about when I edit (2019)
#7Eva is a fellow technical writer. I'm glad to see tech writers get visibility in here.
Re: What I think about when I edit (2019)
#8> Whitespace is key for technical documentation but can also be used to great effect in blog posts, emails, and elsewhere. It’s hard for people to read long paragraphs, especially on a computer screen. They will zone out.
100%. The explanation (?) I first heard which helped me 'get' this whitespace principle was along the lines of
> Have you reached a page in a book with no paragraph breaks and thought 'oh no'?
Re: What I think about when I edit (2019)
#9I was a doc reviewer in my corporate past life and found myself using many of these guidelines. I’d add one more: don’t use different names for the same thing. Many of the docs I reviewed had multiple authors and quite often they used slightly different terminology. This really complicated things for readers. I eventually realised there was a meta-principle here: in tech writing, the reader should never have to resolve ambiguity created by the authors.
Re: What I think about when I edit (2019)
#10I love this.
Inevitably I want to make some improvements.
> “He laughed with the kind of booming abandon that made the whole restaurant turn around and look.”
The kind of? If it's a kind that exists generically then we can't have a past tense, so:
“He laughed with the kind of booming abandon that *makes* the whole restaurant turn around and look.”
But really, why emphasise it being generic? This is better:
“He laughed with *a* booming abandon that made the whole restaurant turn around and look.”
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> Use lists where relevant, because it’s easier to read a bulleted list of items than to read a paragraph with the same information.
Use lists only where all the items have the same status, in some sense. An ordinary paragraph can't be broken up into bullet points.