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Jeannine Klein wondered: <<Do most of you edit on the computer screen
or on a paper printout? And is the answer different depending on
whether the material you're editing was written by you or by someone
else?>>
I've _edited_ almost exclusively on the screen for close to 15 years.
I simply have too much work and edit too extensively for editing on
paper to make any kind of sense. I did both for several years at the
start of my career, but the enormous inefficiencies of editing on
paper simply made that approach nonsensical for me. I moved the
editing online as soon as I could possibly do so.
However, my practice for _proofreading_ varies depending on the
output medium. For work that I'll publish on paper, I proofread
exclusively on paper. For a variety of reasons (which I go into in
some depth in my book -- see below), I don't consider onscreen
proofreading to be an acceptable substitute for on-paper
proofreading. For material that will appear on the screen, I
proofread exclusively on the screen. Proofing in a different medium
can be effective, but is always less effective (sometimes
dramatically so) than editing in the final medium.
<<Also, do you know of any studies on the question? (I can't find
anything in the STC archives.)>>
Every time someone asks me this question, I wish I'd kept records of
my own productivity. All I can say (and because of a lack of
statistics, this can only be taken as anecdotal evidence) is that the
differences were so dramatic I felt no need to keep track.
Think of it this way if you want to do the thought exercise: Almost
every editor I've talked to claims that they edit faster on the
screen (i.e., they reach the end of the document faster), and with
better quality, than they do on paper. That's a productivity and
quality advantage right there. But add to this the fact that after
any on-paper edit, you must still manually copy all the corrections
into what is in all likelihood the original word processor file used
to produce the printout, with the attendant risk of missing things or
introducing new errors (typos, missed words, etc.)*, necessitating a
quality control and error correction phase, and you can see that
working on paper can potentially double the time requirement: one
unit of time for marking the corrections on paper and a second unit
of time for retyping them.
* I did keep statistics on this when I edited on paper and someone
else transferred the corrections into the word processor file. Error
rates ranged from 5% for the really good professional typists to 15%
for the ones who really didn't care about the work.
<<I ask because I have taken over a professional editing course at
the local state university and one of the topics is the relative
frequency of electronic vs paper-based editing.>>
There are still many people who edit on paper, and since you
mentioned "STC archives", have a look at David Dayton's series of
(three?) articles in _Technical Communication_. Dayton provides
several interesting (but in my opinion, flawed) studies of why people
do and do not edit on the screen. In fact, you can probably blame him
(in part) for my book, since I wrote the book specifically as a
rebuttal to the people in his studies who found it so difficult to
work on the screen. I figured that if it was so easy for me, I might
as well write a book to teach others how it can be equally effective
for them.
<<The current course reading is about 10 years old and heavily
weighted in favor of paper-based editing.>>
In your course, don't forget to draw a crucial distinction between
editing (i.e., reading, understanding, and figuring out how to fix a
text) and correcting (entering the fixes that result from editing).
The "editing" part doesn't change much at all, since you require the
same intellectual tools, though there are many things a computer can
do to make you more effective as an editor. The "correcting" part
changes dramatically, since onscreen editing is one of those few
cases in which computers actually make our lives enormously easier.
The other goal of my book, as evidenced by the subtitle ("new tools
for an old profession"), is to show how you use a word processor to
implement those editing skills using a word processor.
<<My own experience in the corporate world is weighted in favor of
online editing, although not so heavily. The disparity was difficult
to handle this past semester; I'd like to resolve it, if only through
anecdotal evidence from this group. Of course, published research
would be even better.>>
If you'd like some more detailed statistics, join the copyediting-l
discussion group (http://www.copyediting-l.info/) and ask your
question there. It's a smaller group than techwr-l (and there's some
overlap), but the proportion of editors is much higher than on techwr-
l. And I spend even more time there than I do here on techwr-l (the
horror! the horror!). <g> In fact, go to <http://surveymonkey.com/>
or any of several similar places on the Web that offer free surveys,
create a survey, advertise it here and there, and collect your own
statistics! Then you've got firsthand data on the relative
proportions of the two types of editing.
----------------------------------------------------
-- Geoff Hart
ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca / geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com
www.geoff-hart.com
--------------------------------------------------
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