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Geoff Hart, in the enviable position of being a *technical* editor, opined:
"That's a very pragmatic suggestion for the kind of environment in which the
company won't provide someone who does only editing. But editing and writing
are sufficiently different skills and have sufficiently different goals that
an editor should be _an editor_ first and foremost. Yes, the skillsets
overlap to a considerable degree, but not fully. A good editor is often a
good writer, but the reverse is true much less often in my experience."
I believe that the skills required in technical editing (as contrasted to fiction editing or newspaper editing, for example) require a significant overlap in skills between the technical editor and technical writer (with the technical editor's being a *superset* of those of the tech writer).
I do not believe that a good technical editor can be "hatched" without signficant experience with the documentation at a level usually only attained by experience in creating it...at least as a general rule.
On the other hand, I do not find it particularly strange or surprising that a good technical writer may not have the necessary attributes to become a good technical editor! In fact, I would hazard a guess that the entire list of attributes possessed by a good technical editor are quite rare--and this, to me, is another indicator that such an editor should be paid better than typical tech writers of similar experience.
Of course, I also believe that a tech writing team should engage in cross-checking documentation for basic errors prior to submitting the work to the editor to begin with. Typos, formatting errors, and the like should not be sent to the editor if they are avoidable! The earlier in the process any error is found and corrected, the better the speed and quality of the finished product IMHO. (This is the documentation equivalent of the theory behind "Extreme Programming" as it happens.)
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