I recently had this discussion at work. The sort of documentation my team develops has a very specific look and feel. The finished product is an end-user help guide that is procedure-intensive, but in a very simple to understand way. In order to do that, there's a lot of repetitive phrasing and very little creative license.
My preference in writing is to take complex software and break it down into bite-size chunks, then organize those chunks in ways that new or intermediate level users will find immediately useful. From an instructional design angle, this is related to Robert Gagne's learning hierarchies. Consequently, I like to rely on an editor to look at what I've done and make the appropriate changes based on Microsoft or Chicago manuals of style. The debate was, and is, how much of that is truly an editor's job and how much falls on the shoulders of the writer?
Simply put, I say it's the writer's job to create and organize the content, and the editor's job to shape and refine it. John Kennedy is a Microsoft blogger who addressed this issue in a post last year. And Peter Crabbe has a very funny, and sharp-edged take on this eternal topic in the Christian Science Monitor.
What's your view?
Editing and writing crave different mindsets, perhaps, and use different toolboxes, but they can easily be the same person.
My mantra as a writer is "keep it short and simple".
My mantra as an editor is "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" (and "if it isn't broken, don't break it").
I think the jobs are different (which explains why they have different job titles), but they can be combined. As you point out, there is even an overlap where it is impossible to distinguish the two activities.
Posted by: Mark Moloney | March 2, 2006 4:22 AM | Permalink to Comment