Technical Editing
The purpose of this course was to hone students' writing and editing skills and mold them into detail oriented editors. I completed various writing exercises in which the different levels of edit were implemented on a document, from developmental to copy editing. It was in this course that I learned the different levels of edit and when and why to use them. I also learned how to write and design query letters, used in the editing process, and learned how to utilize track changes in order to make necessary alterations to someone's work. I enjoyed this class immensely because of the level of involvement in the writing and editing processes.
The class was divided into several projects in which I worked as an individual or with a fellow student. On one particular project a fellow student and I edited two reports that had been created by students from a previous semester. These reports covered topics found in the book Terrarium, by Scott Russell Sanders. This book is a futuristic setting surveying characters that struggle between the city life and reliance on technology, versus the simplistic, independent, environment of nature. These students created reports on certain topics prevalent within the book as if they too were part of the world of Terrarium. The situation was similar to a previous class in which I designed all documents around the book Dune. We created query letters directed towards these mystery students, since of course their identities were never know to us, and edited their documents using track changes. The experience emulated a real-life situation, such as a publishing office or editing position, that would require the same skills and finesse we had to use.
The following are documents I edited independently of a community of practice or collaboration.
The final project in the course consisted of designing an instruction manual for a workout machine often used in Terrarium. This manual had to be easy to use and directed towards an audience within a Terrarium context. This project was useful because it gave me more practice in manual design and usability, a valuable talent as a technical communicator, and was very similar to the poison snooper manual I designed in the tech comm. class. The manual was split into two parts for printing ease. The first portion consisted of the front and back cover and the intro and controls pages. The second section was the how-to portion, which described how to do particular exercises on the machine.
Other Courses
Digital Literacies
Information Design
Senior Capstone