What do independent editors do?

["Geoff Hart" <Geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca>]

Anthony Markatos <<...recently reviewed the STC 
independent contractor salary survey.  It says that the most 
typical task performed by independents is editing.  Who is
going to pay big bucks ($40 - 50 dollars/hour or more) to do 
administrative assistant work?  (That is who typically edits my 
work.)>>

This kind of attitude is both intensely patronizing to 
administrative assistants (several of whom now participate in 
techwr-l, having used their linguistic expertise to move up to 
work that earns them more money and more respect) and 
demonstrative of enormous ignorance of the writing process. 
Not that I'm surprised, mind you, but it's not the kind of 
misstatement that should be allowed to stand unchallenged in 
a public forum.

<<Am I missing something: a more sophisticated service that 
editors provide?>>

Editors provide one crucial thing that writers cannot provide 
for themselves: distance from the manuscript. Short of letting 
a manuscript sit for several weeks so you can approach it with 
a fresh eye, there's no way to attain that distance. Even if you 
do let something sit that long, it still speaks in terms that are 
intimately familiar to you, the author (since those thoughts 
were born within your own head), and usually far less 
familiar to the reader. The same rule applies to editors who 
also write: they need editors too. Without that distance, every 
writer assumes  to a greater or lesser extent that readers share 
theirr personal knowledge and see the world from their own 
perspective, which is rarely the case.

Good editors also provide substantial additional value-added 
by being able to analyze a manuscript to identify problems 
that writers rarely spot on their own (e.g., omitted or incorrect 
references and cross-references, use of language appropriate 
to your audience, incorrect assumptions about the audience's 
knowledge level, rewording complex phrases so they're 
comprehensible to someone other than the author). Editors 
also point out when authors are making an ass of themselves; 
ordinarily, I'd charge $50/hour for the privelege, but let's 
consider this message pro bono work.

And of course we also fix grammatical problems, but that's 
the easy part of the job, and probably why Tony doesn't 
consider the job worth $40-50 per hour: after all, Tony's oft-
stated opinion on techwr-l is that anyone can write 
grammatically, and that anyways, grammar isn't all that 
important in technical communication. I think those 
sentiments speak quite eloquently for themselves, and 
anything I could add to them would only be gilding the lily.

--Geoff Hart @8^{)}  geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca  (Pointe-Claire, Quebec)
"Perhaps there is something deep and profound behind all those sevens, something just calling out for us to discover it. But I 
suspect 
that it is only a pernicious, Pythagorean coincidence." George Miller, "The Magical Number Seven" (1956)