Re: Peer Editing Among Corporate Tech Writing Teams

["Peter Neilson" <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net>]

Some people are natural copy editors. They cannot help but make copy  
better. They fix erroneous homonyms, suggest tighter paragraphs, and  
observe where parallel structure would make things simpler. They slaughter  
cliches and mixed metaphors. They can do this very well for material  
written by others, but quite possibly not for their own.

Others may be able to turn out perfect copy in a first draft. Yes, it's  
unusual, but Isaac Asimov claimed to have the talent for it.

Unfortunately, grammatical blunders elude still other writers, both in  
their own copy and elsewhere. They can can see an error staring at them  
and note notice it at all.

I am of the opinion that people who are poor editors cannot be transformed  
into good ones. The frame of mind required is established early in life.  
The result, in the peer-edited team effort, is likely to be substandard.  
On the bright side, nobody reads instructional copy any more. Sentence  
word present like China language that not concern any person. Nobody read  
it. Who care?

If you're actually going to apply this peer-editing technique, try using  
"many eyes" in much the same way as is used to catch bugs in Linux. A  
culture shift and a tool like git may be required. Do not give up at the  
first sign of failure. Nor at the second. Nor even at the third.

On Mon, 27 Feb 2017 16:49:22 -0500, David Renn <daverenn08 -at- gmail -dot- com>  
wrote: