What Is Technical Editing?

English 403
Dr. Willerton
Fall 2008

Definitions of technical editing

Technical editing entails altering someone else’s words so that those words are may be more easily understood.

…those processes which result in revising technical documents for greater clarity.

-- Joseph C. Mancuso, Technical Editing (1992)

Technical editors are people who edit technical information. They work in many fields, including engineering, computer hardware and software, science, medicine, law, banking, and website development for any business or activity. Technical editors' primary job is to ensure documents are suitable for their target audience, thus technical editing is really a quality control job.

-- Jean Hollis Weber, “The Technical Editor’s Eyrie” (website)

Technical Editing takes a comprehensive approach to editing and defining editorial responsibility in terms of information design and the overall effectiveness of a document in helping readers understand and complete tasks. Expanding the concept of editing from a narrow focus on sentence-level revisions for correctness, this book encourages students to think about the effects of word choices, sentences, organization and design. Students learn that the measure of a “good” document is in part outside that document, in the document’s “match” to the users’ needs and the author’s goals.

-- Publisher’s website for Technical Editing (4^th ed.) by Carolyn D. Rude

Editing is “not merely a mechanical procedure, but a complex and creative process”
The editor’s job “is to mediate the writer-reader relationship, and therefore requires a sensitivity to both the writer’s aims and the reader’s needs”
Editing is “applicable to writers and readers in all disciplines and to the texts of all disciplines”

-- from Editing: The Design of Rhetoric by Sam Dragga and Gwendolyn Gong