How Editors Can Help - Part 3: Implementing Your Standards

In my previous blog, I discussed all the things that should be considered by a company when producing documentation and how an editor can help. In this blog, I will discuss how to go about implementing those decisions and how hiring an editor to review your documentation can save you time and frustration. 

Applying Your Standards 

Once you’ve determined your documentation standards, you need to apply them. This can be a time-consuming process for your writers, as there are many elements to keep in mind and it could be a struggle not only to remember them all, but also to apply them consistently when focusing on developing content. An editor can review these documents to ensure they comply with the established standards. 

To make the process as efficient as possible, an editor can also help develop templates and themes for your word processing program that your content developers can use when producing future documents. This can include heading, paragraph, and table styles to establish the correct fonts, sizes, and text colors for your documents according to your brand standards. While a template or theme won’t help with maintaining writing standards, it will help ensure all your documents have the same look and feel (provided it is used and applied correctly) and can help the document’s formatting function more predictably. 

Formatting Documents 

Anyone who has used Word, PowerPoint, or other desktop publishing tools knows that they can have their quirks. Hiring an experienced editor lets you leverage advanced tools without having to provide extensive training for your team.  

In other words, rather than have your engineers struggle with editing and finicky formatting issues, you can entrust this responsibility to an editor. This way, your engineers can focus on raw content, while the editor refines, formats, and makes the content look professional. 

Editors can also adapt formatting for different outputs—print, online, or eBooks—ensuring consistency across all mediums.  

Quality Control 

A bonus to having an editor review all your documentation is that they can often act as another layer of quality control for your content. While not necessarily subject matter experts, editors are trained to notice differences and deviations in text and can pick up on content that may be incorrect if it isn’t consistent with the rest of the document.  

Using the same editor or editorial team for all of your documentation also ensures that one person (or team) has oversight on all of your content. They would be able to spot if you have conflicting information across documents or contradictions in your text. And they will act as another set of eyes to make sure everything makes sense.

If you think you could use the help of an editor, please reach out so we can discuss your needs.