How Editors Can Help - Part 2: Establishing Your Style

If you read my previous post, you now understand what an editor can be responsible for and why you might need an editor. In this post, I’m going to dive deeper into the sorts of decisions a company should be making if they produce documentation and what an editor can contribute to the process. 

How your company’s content is presented is a reflection of your organization, whether internally to employees or externally to clients. The purpose and audience of your documentation should be considered, but so should the voice/tone and professional brand you want to project. Many organizations struggle with this, which can result in documentation that comes across as unprofessional or sends a confusing message that leads to customer dissatisfaction. Using an editor to oversee your documentation could be the solution – here’s how they can help. 

Establish a Voice 

A lot of documentation can be quite technical in nature, so it’s important to consider your audience when producing documents. For example, is the document for fellow engineers who will understand technical jargon or is it for a more general user who may need the language and terminology simplified or explained? You should also establish whether the tone should be formal or informal, or one of the varying degrees in between. 

Establishing an intended voice is especially important if you have multiple writers producing your documents as you ideally want all of your documentation to be written using the same voice. An editor can assist you in defining that intended voice and help standardize your documentation company-wide.  

Establish a Style 

When we talk about style, there are two things this can refer to. The first is the style of the text – when and where to use bold and italic formatting, which terms are hyphenated or which are open, which dictionary and spelling standard to follow, which preferred spelling to use if there is more than one variant, etc. 

The second is the style of the document itself – its formatting. There is a long list of things to consider when creating a document: what will the headings look like, how many levels of headings can be used, how will tables be styled and formatted, which fonts to use, which colors to use, what are the preferred paragraph styles and indent levels, how to format bullets or numbered lists, etc.  

You may also need to establish styles and standards for different markets. What works for North America doesn’t necessarily work in other regions. An editor can help navigate these differences and determine styles for proper communications for international audiences. 

With so many style decisions to make, it can be an overwhelming process. An editor can help guide that process and help you make those decisions. They can then establish a style guide to capture those decisions, which can be distributed to your content developers to be used across all your documentation.  

Maintain Consistency 

You may think that once you’ve established your company’s voice and style, your writers can simply follow these guidelines to produce consistent documentation company-wide. While establishing your voice and style standards is a key step, it’s often hard to get all of your writers to follow these guidelines 100% of the time, so there will undoubtedly still be inconsistencies across the board.  

Hiring an editor who will review all produced documents will give you the necessary oversight to ensure that consistency is maintained. The editor will follow the voice and style standards established by your company to make sure that all the documents read with a consistent voice as if they were written by a single writer. 

In my next blog post, I will dive deeper into some of the ways editors can help to implement your established standards.