Length:
2 days in-person, or, six 2-hour sessions online
Fee:
$975.00 USD
Who should attend?
Although designed to help writers be better self-editors and peer editors, the course is also a good review for those employed as editors. Writers and editors from the same company can enjoy taking the class together to incorporate their own styleguide standards into the exercises, building a better relationship and understanding the expectations from both sides a little better in the process.
Upcoming workshop:
This workshop title is currently offered online.
In-person workshops for your team can be scheduled for 2 days. Please contact us for team training options.
Description
The editing process often causes anxiety and frustration on the part of both writer and editor. Proud of their work and conscious of the time it took to prepare, writers may take edits personally or be argumentative about suggested changes. On the flip side, editors may grow weary of marking the same things over and over again.
A simple solution to the problem is for writers to turn in cleaner copy in the first place. This goal, however, relies on writers allocating enough time in their process for self-editing, as well as adopting an editing mindset, understanding what they should be looking for, and identifying their own blind spots and bad habits.
Toward that end, the workshop is designed to help writers become better writers by becoming better editors. Both high-level editing strategies and specific common errors to watch for are addressed over the course of the class which covers four levels of editing:
- Context
- Structural
- Stylistic
- Copy
Participants will also see how the choices made in these editing stages not only directly impact user comprehension and satisfaction, but also affect translation, reuse, and accessibility concerns.
You will learn to
- Review content with a fresh set of eyes and a new perspective
- Identify your blind spots and create a personal editing checklist
- Evaluate the appropriateness of content for a specific audience
- Validate that content meets its stated purpose
- Test the usability of your content
- Improve the findability of your content
- Assess the flow of information at both a macro and micro level
- Ensure consistency in content structure
- Affect content personality and tone of voice through word choice and sentence structures
- Check adherence to a corporate style guide
- Take into account translation and localization concerns
- Edit to make content more reusable
- Remove potentially offensive terminology
- Eliminate unnecessary wordiness
- Clean up common grammar and punctuation mistakes
Prerequisites
No previous knowledge is required for this workshop. However, before attending this workshop, please choose a content sample that you want to edit during the interactive or homework sessions. We recommend that you have the content available in both printed and electronic formats. Participants might also want to find their corporate style guidelines to use throughout the course.
Online Course Required Materials / Background
- Laptop / personal computer
- Internet access
- Course is delivered using a live, interactive virtual online classroom, providing an environment for optimal learning
- 6 sessions, 1 per week over the course of 6 weeks
- Homework assignments will be provided each week
- Sessions are approximately 2 hours in length