Technical Editing Submission Notes

andrewch's picture
Submitted by andrewch on Tue, 02/21/2012 - 10:38
  1. Usernames of Editors (including yours):

    2. andrewch (me) and MelanieP

  2. Author and Title of KB Journal article edited:

    3. Media Coverage of Natural Disasters: Pentadic Cartography and the Case of the 1993 Great Flood of the Mississippi by Kevin R. McClure

  3. Chapter or Section Edited in Richardson Manuscript:

    4. Chapter 1: An Image to Honor and Worship

  4. Describe some of the challenges or questions that came up as you edited the KB Journal article.

    5. The journal article that we edited need a lot of polishing. What challenged me most was the distinction between an edit and a revision. When editing this article, I found myself rearranging paragraphs and rewording entire sentences. Clarity is necessary, but it's also important not to compromise the author's original intent. We also had some trouble with the HTML, which was easily frustrating. Our article had a lot of footnotes, so replacing those with superscript numbers was agonizingly tedious.

  5. Describe some of the challenges or questions that came up as you edited the Richardson chapter or section.

    6. Probably the most challenging aspect of the book chapter was coordinating different documents with Dropbox. Eventually, we discovered that if one of us updated a copy of a particular document while the other had a different version open, that second version would replace the earlier one, deleting all the changes made. It took us a little bit too long to figure that out. . .
    With regard to style and voice, we again faced tough decisions about how much license to take. Our chapter had some stylistic choices that struck us as somewhat inappropriate for the context of the work. The author chose an informal voice, using parenthetical asides that were, at times, too familiar and informal.

  6. Name two "rules" that you now know that you didn't know before.

    7. I was not aware of the necessity of spaces between each period of an ellipses, nor did I expect that there was so much attention paid to the conventions of hyphens. Also, I was glad to gain some clarification on the subtleties of quotation marks and italics.

  7. What's one thing you learned about the tools used in technical editing?

    8. I learned that side-by-side HTML and design editing is helpful if you sort of know how to write code, but not very well

  8. Describe one thing you've learned about the practice of technical editng.

    9. I realized that authors do a lot of their own editing, but the real nitty-gritty, detailed work is handed off to another party.

  9. At the end of your submission notes, provide a link to your "Memo of Understanding" post.

    10. Memo of Understanding from andrewch

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