RE: How is editing organized in your company?

[David Handy <david -dot- handy -at- automsoft -dot- com>]

Tom,
By "real editing" you mean the appointment of one or 
more full-time editors, as opposed to peer reviews or 
ad-hoc team lead reviews. If you have twelve or more 
writers producing technical copy, this would be good 
if not essential practise. 

For me, the two main questions are as follows: 

* What is your writers' throughput of editable docs -- 
what volume of docs do they produce, and at what 
speed? 

* How technical/specialised are the docs to be edited? 
Put another way, how much knowledge must an 
editor possess in the areas your writers are covering? 

A few years ago I worked for a company with approx. 
sixteen writers and four editors. The system was well 
bedded-down, and across the board, four writers 
produced enough copy for a single editor on a daily 
basis. That ratio was inevitably based on a certain 
volume of copy at a certain level of technical specificity. 
The editors were invariably promoted from the writing 
pool. 

NB At the moment I work without a "real editor" as 
you put it; editing is folded into the testing & QA 
functions. (But I'm the only writer here.) 

To compound matters slightly, another question:

* How similar/different are the areas in which your 
writers produce text? Would an editor be expected to
be familiar with several distinct technical areas, and if 
so, is that a reasonable expectation given your 
product? This may impact how you grow your writers 
and editors in-house (versus hiring from outside), and 
how you keep to an efficient writer-editor ratio. 

HTH,

dh
automsoft


-----Original Message-----
Subject: How is editing organized in your company?
From: Tom Storer <tstorer_tw -at- yahoo -dot- com>
Date: Sat, 4 Jan 2003 03:44:12 -0800 (PST)
X-Message-Number: 3

<several snips below>

Greetings and Happy New Year to all. I just discovered
this newsgroup and will take advantage of it to ask a
question.

The context: we'll have 15 to 20 writers plus 2 or 3 web
technology specialists, divided among 5 or 6 main
product or functional groups. The writers in each
group will report to a doc lead who in turn will
report to a dev manager, but there will be some
transversal doc duties to ensure consistency of style,
template usage, and so on. 

The idea of "real" editing in the medium term is now
under consideration. By "real" editing I mean a more
centralized activity with clear processes and
definition of responsibilities. We are thinking we
might have a full-time editor, or perhaps have two
people doing it half-time, working the rest of the
time on normal documentation duties.

The question: How *is* such an activity handled in
real life? 

P.S. I'm not asking about how to edit, levels of
editing, that sort of thing.


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