Technology in editing
Image: Public Domain
A little while back I wrote an article called Secrets of the editing trade. It became one of our most popular posts, so I thought I’d follow up by exploring some of the tools we use at Red Pony in a little more detail.
While the act of putting words to the page (or correcting the existing words) has remained fundamentally the same whether using pen and paper, typewriter or computer, technological advances have dramatically changed the way that people engage with the text. The internet has bought us new ways of accessing vast troves of information (not to mention countless cat pictures). Dictionaries are no longer restricted to the physical realm, as McKinley explained in Are print dictionaries dying? And should we care?, they are now online, searchable and readily accessible to anyone and everyone.
Anyone who has ever experimented with Google Translate, or watched a five-year old try to use Siri will probably understand why I believe technology is still some way from advancing to the point where it can replace the role of editors. But there are some useful tools that can use macros and algorithms to indicate where errors may be or phrasing can be improved. One such tool is PerfectIt, which I discussed in my original post. Another is StyleWriter, which we use to assess the overall quality of a document when providing quotes. StyleWriter provides a statistical assessment of the level of complexity and readability in the document, which is a reliable indicator of the amount of editing or proofreading that will be required. There are other programs of varying degrees of sophistication and application, such as Grammarly and EditTools.
Style sheets are another tool of the trade I discussed in my previous post. This alphabetic listing of unusual word forms, acronyms and client- or project-specific terms helps us maintain consistency across documents and projects. Previously we would create the style sheet as a Microsoft Word document, but this year we began using the online wiki Confluence by Atlassian to enable us to share the style sheet between writers, editors and proofreaders in real time.
Now when we finish a project, we can export the updated version of the style sheet from Confluence to Word and send it to the client. They can review our recommendations and any modifications can be made as a global change to the documents we reviewed.
