Technical Editors’ Eyrie
Submitted by Dawn McIlvain Stahl on Mon, 10/17/2011 - 1:32pm
It is possible that I’m the last editor online to discover Jean Hollis Weber’s Technical Editors’ Eyrie. A quick search shows that it is listed in two of my go-to resource lists for editors: Katharine O’Moore-Klopf’s Copyeditor’s Knowledge Base and The Editorium's resources section.
Weber contributes to the very helpful OpenOffice user guides, which can be found on the OpenOffice.org wiki. She is also a contributing author for Technical Editing in the 21st Century (2010) and New Perspectives on Technical Editing (2010), considered by the Society for Technical Communication (STC) as one of the Top 100 Technical Communication Books of 1991-2010. Technical Editors’ Eyrie won a Merit Award in the 2002 online communication competition of the STC’s Australia branch.
The site includes much timeless advice and resources useful for copyeditors—and not just those working with technical writing. In the How To section, for example, you can find advice for planning and preparing for editing, editing tips and techniques, and a number of helpful checklists. The planning and preparing advice includes developing department style guides, working with style sheets, analyzing a document before you began editing, and watching for variations in English (see, for example, the list of terms in U.S., UK, Canadian, Australian and Indian English). In the tips and techniques, you’ll find information on substantive editing, gender-neutral writing, and escaping from the “grammar trap.”
From the latest OpenOffice techniques to timeless editing advice, Weber puts her 30+ years of experience to good use. Other editors who have missed Weber’s work may want to pay her eyrie a visit.
Image courtesy of Ingrid Taylar (ingridtaylar).
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