Editing test on my website?

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Bonnie Granat wondered: <<My contract fizzled this week, so I am back  
in the game, so to speak.>>

Sympathies. Best of luck finding fun new work!

<<Anyway, I took an editing test today. I was asked to  
developmentally edit and line edit an article for a company that was  
published on the Web more than two years ago. If I do not get the  
assignment, is there any reason for me not to use the test as an  
example of my editing on my website?>>

The best reason in the world: the test is copyrighted in the name of  
the person who wrote it. Your edits are indeed your own intellectual  
property, but you can't republish the original text without the  
author's permission.

What you can do, with a lot more work, is to make up your own  
example. Let's say you found a range of problems, including (for the  
sake of example) one that illustrates illogical sequencing of  
information. You can now create your own example of text with an  
illogical sequence: if the original test described the steps in the  
assembly of a club sandwich, your example could describe the steps in  
the assembly of a Lego car. See the principle? Use your edits in the  
test to identify a class of problem (bad sequence, internal  
contradiction, inconsistency, bad grammar, missing information,  
useless redundancies, etc.), then create your own example that shows  
the same problems.

Here's a trick that will help you do this faster: Write a short (500  
words max?) description of some process, and make it the best  
description you could possibly create as a technical writer...  
something that will make the rest of us gasp in envy and want to hire  
you immediately. That's your "after". Now create the "before": take a  
list of steps and delete one minor step that should not be deleted,  
then reverse the order of two other steps that must occur in the  
"after" sequence. Where you repeat information, make the first  
instance contradict the second instance. And so on. Have fun with it!
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Geoff Hart   ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca

(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)

www.geoff-hart.com

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