What's an edit? (was Re: Computer jobs for liberal arts majors?)

[Ad absurdum per aspera <JTCHEW -at- LBL -dot- GOV>]

{From misc.writing}
> Yes -- most technical writers never actually WRITE anything.  Ever.
> They're editors:  someone else drafts the work, and you restructure
> the sentences, and maybe the entire document.

Depends on how you define "editing," I suppose.  Overall,
count me among those who think that's too sweeping a
generalization.  When wearing my technical-communicator
hat, I do a mixture of writing-from-scratch; writing from
source documents; and various degrees of editing.  As the
saying goes, "the average varies."

Note also that a lot of technical writers make heavy use
of existing work, whatever its origin, and rightfully so:
their goal is to finish documents so that the product can
be shipped (or whatever else is to be done), not to create
original work every time just so they can take pride in
doing so.  There's another person up here, like me a "writer,"
with whom I've exchanged documents so many times we'd have to
think for a long while to figure out who wrote any given one
in the first place.  It isn't plagiarism; it's leveraging of
existing resources.  :)

In these cases, I'm generally adding and removing substantive
material as well as "restructuring sentences and maybe the
entire document"; call this an edit if you will. In  _The
Levels of Edit_, Robert Van Buren and Mary Fran Buehler list
this sort of thing among the "extraordinary editorial
functions" that are not included even in the "substantive
edit" (and which call for an exception to their organization's
time and cost estimation guidelines).

Perhaps their prefatory comment that "edit [is used]
indiscriminately to mean many things" sums it up the best!


> most people in industry have no idea what an editor is.

True...much to the detriment of their written communications.

I suppose that "peer editing" amongst the writers is possible,
if the other writer has a knack for editing (some do, some
don't), and hasn't been associated with the document too
closely for too long, and, above all, is allowed to take
enough time away from *his* writing to do the editing well.
Most peer editing that I've seen, and probably some that I've
done, has for these reasons been well-intended hackwork.

Joe "Everybody's a critic" Chew