No one Uses Style Guides!
I enjoyed the interview with Val Swisher about Acrolinx. I had no idea there was such a tool, but I can see the value in having a tool that pushes information rather than having to pull the information from outside sources.
The price tag for Acrolinx is steep, but for large companies, the return on investment is worth it. I assume much of the cost goes toward the backend work to customize the rules and styles for a specific enterprise.
I did have to chuckle when she declared that NO ONE uses style guides after their first 6 weeks at a company. I hope this is because after 6 weeks they are proficient and have learned the content of the style guides. I’ve been learning all about different style guides and style sheets, have them bookmarked, and put a hard copy of CMOS on my wish list…and now I find out that no one really uses them!
Do You Want it On Time or Do You Want it Right?
Her reasoning is that there just isn’t time. It comes down to the triple constraints of time, scope, and cost. “Do you want it on time or do you want it right?” she asks. The advanced editorial tool takes away the constraint of time so we can have it on time AND right.
I can also the value in using an advanced editorial tool to standardize content across cross-functional groups of an organization. For the comprehensive editing project, my team edited the employee handbook for a manufacturing company which is a subsidiary of a larger company. The handbook was authored by managers and directors from several different functional areas (none of them technical writers). And some material was lifted from documents written at the parent company. The result was a cut and pasted mess. The various authors used different formatting, different points of view, different voices, different capitalization and punctuation styles, and even different ways to name the company. 50+ hours later it looks like a completely different document. My team worked hard to create a comprehensive style sheet, which hopefully will serve the company going forward. They didn’t have a style sheet before this, which is part of the reason the document wasn’t consistent.
Will I Be Replaced?
Intelligent Editing posted a study of how well human editors scored against their machine (PerfectIt). Humans won some rounds, and PerfectIt won others, but there were also some false positives. Perfectit, of course, worked much faster than the human editor.
I also learned from Shelley Podolny about advances in AI writing technology. AI is now used for content creation, not just for editing. Robo-journalism appears to be on the rise, especially for more formulaic genres like sports writing. It is even used in fiction. Philip M. Parker, for example, has created over a million books with his algorithmic AI system.
No thanks. My background is in literature, and this is not literature. To me, a good book is one where I want to go back and read a line or a paragraph again just to enjoy the words. My favorite books have excellent plots and development but also excellent phrasing and vocabulary. I just don’t think a robo-writer will ever be capable of that. So I’ll pass on robo-writing for pleasure reading, but I suppose it does serve a function, which is why 100K of Parker’s books are available on Amazon.
Will I soon be out of a job as a writer/editor? No. Someone has to do the customizing. The machine can work well for sentence-level edits, but only if the machine is used correctly. And machines can’t do developmental/structural editing.
English Grammar Circa 1992
One of my favorite things about my editing class has been being introduced to the work of Carol Saller. After listening to a couple of her podcasts, I bought The Subversive Copy Editor. I love her wry sense of humor and her healthy approach to the editorial role. She’s also taught me about when and why it’s OK to break rules.
I keep thinking about a statement she makes near the end of the book. She says that people who study engineering or biology in college know that their knowledge is outdated. But people who study English in school think that everything they learned is still true, even if the last time they studied English was 1992.
I was in college in 1992, studying English. So maybe she’s talking about me! I’ve always had a fairly descriptive approach to grammar and usage though, not a prescriptive one. And I’ve lived in enough different places to appreciate that there’s not just one version of English.
My Favorite Grammar/Usage Change
Copy editors pride themselves on knowing the rules, but even English grammar rules can change. Grammar and especially usage evolve over time. “There are no universal and immutable, God-given style and grammar rules,” Saller says. I guess that’s why CMOS is in its 17th edition.
During my handbook editing project, I learned about a change that I can really get behind. I’ve been a feminist since before I knew what the word meant, and sexist language has always bothered me (high botheration level). But I also never loved the he/she, him/her, his/hers fix. So I’m happy to know that we can officially (per CMOS) use they/them with a singular antecedent.
We already do it in casual speech: “Everyone get their shoes on!” And I did it twice in the third paragraph of this post. But technically the grammar isn’t “correct.” In the employee handbook, there were lots of “employee…he/she” statements. I was happy to change all of these to “they.” It’s just less clunky and more natural. And hopefully this shift in usage will also help my generation get used to people using “they/them” personal pronouns.
Professional Editorial Standards
This list of 12 competencies in technical editing includes both necessary knowledge and fundamental practices. Going through the list, I realized how much I learned in this editing class.
One competency is to know how the scope of a project affects the editorial process. For the handbook project, we needed to understand the audience and purpose of the employee handbook. This guided our editorial choices.
Another competency is to set and maintain a reasonable schedule. My team had a schedule and multiple deadlines for each stage of the process. We divided the work and each of us had to stay on schedule or the other team member would be negatively affected. We were able to do this and didn’t need the extra days we had allowed at the end.
I need to do a better job of following this principle for my own work. I’m a part-time contract writer, so I can do my work whenever it’s convenient. But sometimes that means I’m not very efficient with my time. I would do better to have certain hours set aside for projects. And to manage my distractions.
Another competency I want to work on is using current editing technology. I want to learn to use macros, become more proficient with styles, and learn how to cite correctly. I would like to become more familiar with CMOS and other style guides.
I also need to become more proficient with file sharing technology. We had some trouble with Teams. Sometimes when I tried to work on a file, I got an error message that the file was locked…something to do with SharePoint. The workaround was to download the file, work on it, then upload it with a new name. But I’d like to solve the issue.
The Employee Handbook Project
My team has just finished editing the employee handbook and sent it to the company. I hope it will be a great benefit to them. The editing project was a great benefit to me as well. I can read about editing and talk about editing and take editing tests, but I learn the most by actually editing.
I appreciated working collaboratively. I learned so much from my partner, who has much more professional experience than I do. And she was very patient with me. It was very helpful to have someone to share ideas with and to ask questions to. For the most part, I knew how to edit, but didn’t always know what to edit and what to leave alone.
My takeaways from the project:
- Always use a style sheet. I’ve never used one before and certainly never created one. But it was so helpful to have a set of customized “rules” to refer to.
- Check EVERYTHING. I thought I was a fairly meticulous editor. I did well on the copyediting pre-test and I’m usually good at finding mistakes other people miss. But my partner went way beyond my usual level of editing. She checked phone numbers, web links, and looked up exact names of government agencies referred to in the handbook.
- Styles can help a lot. I’d never used styles in Word before, even though I’d completed the tutorial and I see the styles pane every day. My partner used styles to format our project and the results were amazing. I got my own practice when I used styles to format our cover letter. It was a much shorter and simpler document, so there was less I could do harm to! I need more practice, but it’s a start.
Next Steps
Even though it’s been time-consuming, I’m sad to be at the end of my editing course. I’ve loved reading articles and posts from so many different technical editors and learning about the profession. I feel like I’ve found my people. I’ve wondered if there are studies on the personality traits of editors. There’s a certain way an editor’s brain works, and I feel comfortable in this group. I’m looking forward to my next TECM courses, but at this point I feel like editing is my favorite area.