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Workshop Offerings
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Instructor Bios
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Copyediting for Technical Documentation
(One-day workshop)
Date(s):
Jul 23 | Sep 19
Instructor(s): Peter Keville | Kate Merlino
Description
This workshop is a hands-on review of what it means to be a professional technical editor. This workshop is for technical writers and editors who want to sharpen their editing skills. The course covers a range of best-practice copyediting techniques with an emphasis on improving your competence, speed, and confidence in reviewing technical manuscripts. Topics include a review of the technical writer as editor, editorial rules and style guides, copyediting techniques and proofreading symbols, types and levels of editing, the writer-editor review process, and online versus paper editing. Included are refresher-to-intensive copyediting exercises, a quick reference on editorial tips, and grammar and effective writing checklists.
Prerequisites:
The course assumes that participants have at least two years of technical writing/editing experience and are generally familiar with: Common editorial rules and in-house style guides, general copyediting techniques and proofreading symbols, types and levels of editing, editing and rewriting, and the writer/editor review process.
Topics Include:
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- Lesson 1: Role of the Technical Editor
- The role of the Editor
- Effective writing checklist
- Definition of editorial terms
- Editing procedures and tips
- Editing principles
- Lesson 2: Marking copy using proofreaders' marks
- Proofreaders' marks
- Exercise: practice marking copy
- Lesson 3: Copyediting: Three groups of changes
- Lesson 4: Group 1 – 'Down-and-Out' Wrong
- Exercise: spelling
- Why punctuation matters
- Punctuation rules
- Exercise: punctuation
- Dangling and misplaced modifiers
- Exercise: Dangling and misplaced modifiers
- Guidelines on pronoun/antecedent agreement
- Subject/verb agreement
- Exercise: Subject/verb agreement
- Parts of speech
- Parts of sentences
- Restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses
- Exercise: Restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses
- Who/Whom
- Exercise: Who/Whom
- Hyphenation
- Exercise: Hyphenation
- Lesson 5: Group 2 – Editorial Consistency
- Consistency of style
- Sample style sheet
- Exercise: Editorial consistency
- Lesson 6: Group 3 – Editorial enhancements/improvements
- Using sensitive language
- Exercise: using sensitive language
- Repeating over and over, not only stating, but restating the obvious
- Exercise: redundancy
- Smothered verbs and other words
- Exercise: Smothered verbs
- To be or not to be – active and passive voice
- Exercise: Passive voice
- Exercise: Active and Passive voice
- What's wrong with this picture? Parallelism
- Exercise: parallelism
- Lesson 7: Practice copyediting
- Exercise: practice copyediting
- Lesson 8: Levels of editing
- Assessing needs and determining levels of edit
- Factors influencing edit time
- Guidelines for time estimates
- Developing and using a checklist
- Needs and levels of edit, again
- Lesson 9: Practice assessing and copyediting
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To learn more about nSight training programs and for assistance, please contact our Training department at 781-273-6300 or Training@nSightWorks.com.
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