Facilitators: Gail
Jacky & Brad Peters, Northern Illinois University Writing Center
Objectives and outcomes: Tech and
marketing writers will examine the kinds of editing tasks they do for the
variety of documents they produce for the company. They will: (1) identify general and document-specific editing
criteria, (2) draft editing checklists for typical company documents, (3)
practice editing skills, and (4) design a protocol for a general Editing
Handbook that all company tech and marketing writers can use.
8:00 - 8:30:
Rationale—Why Have this Workshop? a preview of the day’s activities and goals.
8:30 – 9:30: Look at before/after versions of an outside company
memo—what are the reasons for the editing decisions? Participants will identify some common editing criteria.
9:30 – 10:00: Examine
the company’s editing checklist for manuals—which criteria carry over to other
documents and which don’t? Participants
will design an editing checklist for outside memos.
10:00 – 11:00: Design
editing checklists for other short documents—which criteria are applicable to
specific writing tasks? Participants
will form mixed teams (tech and marketing) to look over documents from four
general categories: (1) ordering documents, (2) product change or product
improvement documents, (3) dealer communications, (4) product brochures and
bulletins. Teams will draft criteria
for editing checklists in each category and report back to the rest of the
workshop participants.
11:00 – 11:30: Identify other short documents that need editing
checklists—how do documents’ different functions set them apart? Participants will add to a list of short
documents the facilitators have compiled from sample Woods literature.
11:30 – 1:00: Lunch
Break
1:00 – 2:00: Proof a letter to a dealer—what editing concerns are most
common for all writers? Participants
will use a 23-item checklist to edit a typical
short document.
2:00 – 3:00: Edit 2-3
pages of a current project—what “editing patterns” do different writers have,
and what can an editing partner identify?
Participants will each bring 2-3 pages of an “in-progress” project they
are currently working on and edit it.
They will then exchange documents with a partner (mixed teams) who
studies and summarizes the original writer’s “editing patterns,” adding any
editing concerns the original writer may have missed.
3:00 – 4:00: Design an
Editing Handbook—what kinds of editing checklists will prove most useful to
company writers? Unmixed teams of tech
and marketing writers will draft a “table of contents,” identifying short and
long documents that commonly need editing.
They will report back to all workshop participants. Participants will discuss follow-up on
designing an Editing Handbook for the company.