professional writers and editors

 professional writers and editors

The Importance of Professional Writers and Editors

1. The Role of Professional Writers and Editors

This is arguably the most visible benefit associated with using professional writers and editors. The hiring of a person in a professional capacity implies that the work is being treated seriously. When engineering team managers decide to look for technical writing specialists, they are, by association, making a statement to their engineering team. The message is that the written documentation and communication are serious components of the engineering process. This action can change the perception of the communication phase of a project. The engineers might hold the opinion that documentation is a necessary evil; however, when specialists are employed to handle this task, a professional writer can assert that his job is to “supplement the engineer’s work by improving the quality of the final product” (personal communication, Brian Fox, Oak Ridge National Laboratories). The improvement in communication can elevate itself to another benefit that affects the engineers directly. In an engineering environment, it is often the case that a poor English grammar structure can result in loss of time searching for answers to simple questions. Professional technical writers are strongly grounded in functional knowledge of information organization and can produce documents that are targeted at specific tasks. This can reduce ambiguity in the methods and results of some tasks (Hagen, 1990). A documentation editor at his best is a critical thinker. His strongest asset is the ability to question the text. A statement made by an engineer that “the documentation should be a reflection of the product information” can ignite the critical thinking process.

Guideline 1: Use a persuasive tone in your response.

3. The employment of professional writers and editors increases the likelihood of successful IC design teams. Still, there is much room for improving the working conditions and efficiency of technical writers and editors.

2. Benefits of Hiring Professional Writers and Editors

Employing a professional means you are making an investment in your document which has a better chance of achieving its purpose. The document may be a yearly newsletter to employees. If it raises morale and motivation, the company will see ongoing benefits throughout the year. It may be a letter of proposal for a new company partnership. If that document is successful, the company could earn thousands in extra revenue. A writer can vastly improve the quality of your document and is a cost-effective investment in the long run.

The employment of professional writers and editors will lead to a clear, concise document which is reader friendly and not open to misinterpretation. Whether you are writing a prepared speech or a company report, the writing should be informative and easily understood. If the reader has to go over a sentence more than once to figure out its meaning, the document has failed in its mission. Saving time is saving money. In business, you know time is money. How much of your own valuable time have you spent writing? Is it really an effective use of that time, is it the best for the company or yourself? Writing is a skill just like any other, do what you do best and let others provide their expertise.

3. How Professional Writers and Editors Enhance Content Quality

The League of American Communications Professionals (LACP) has gathered extensive research in order to understand what type of content is effective for companies and organizations in order to build their reputations and meet objectives. In a survey involving 307 participants, LACP discovered that 48 percent of participants believe that well-written content is the most important factor for increasing a company’s reputation. In another LACP survey, participants were asked what factors determined a website’s effectiveness, with 33 percent selecting well-written content. With professional writers and editors, your content will be polished, effectively getting your message across to your readers.

Professional writers and editors understand the pitfalls of poor writing – whether it’s easily remedied problems like incorrect grammar, punctuation, and spelling, or larger issues concerning clarity and readability. Professional writers and editors work together to produce the best possible end product. The professional writer creates a written draft, which is then sent to the professional editor who reviews the draft and makes notes on it. The editor and writer will discuss the notes and decide on the best way to implement the changes. After this, the writer will often revise the draft and submit the revised draft to the editor. This process will be repeated until the professional editor feels that the content is in its best possible form.

4. The Impact of Professional Writers and Editors on Communication

The method of error counting also fails to take into account the fact that errors do not occur randomly in writing. They are instead symptoms of the underlying problems that occur as the result of particular writing or composing strategies. This means that we need to understand the process and strategy by which errors are made if we are to truly understand the nature of error in writing. Only in this way can we hope to distinguish between more and less effective writing behaviours. Speaking theoretically, this means tracking errors to the point where we can locate the specific strategies responsible for them, and then understanding the conditions of use of these strategies. Then and only then can we hope to decide that one form of words is erroneous because it represents a less effective strategy. By contrast, another form might be non-standard, but not erroneous, because it is the result of a perfectly effective, but informal strategy. At the highest level, this type of approach can integrate the study of error in writing with the study of language use compared to context and communicative purpose. Therefore, a good understanding of the process of writing and the strategies used in generating particular types of text are essential if we are to provide an account of the errors that occur. And it is here that the nature of the task of professional writers and editors becomes most significant.

So how do we judge good and bad writing? This is a question that lies at the heart of much communication research. A common method, advocated by early writing researchers, has been to measure writing in terms of errors. Based on the results of experiments, a number of textbooks set limits on the number of errors that writing at various levels of schooling should contain. If limits of this kind were exceeded, then a piece of writing was considered to be unsatisfactory. However, it is in the definition of an error that problems begin to arise. These limits are necessarily arbitrary; a decision had to be made as to what would constitute an error and what would constitute an acceptable variation. In some cases these decisions are based on little more than the intuition of the experimenters. The result is that the evaluation criteria of most composition textbooks are too imprecise to allow reliable evaluation.

5. Conclusion: Investing in Professional Writers and Editors

Professional writers and editors offer comprehensive, timely, and cost-effective writing services. Whether a company is trying to create an identity, make a sale, or better serve its customers, these specialists can accomplish these goals through their writing or through improvements to already-existing text. In an era of deadline downsizing and information overload, many organizations find that they lack the time, resources, and attention required to convey their messages effectively. These specialists can work autonomously or in collaboration with clients and their engineering teams to produce quality documents with minimal supervision. By taking the writing task off of an engineer’s plate, a writer can save him time, effort, and a few headaches. And who knows? He might even learn something from the writer’s free advice on grammar.

If an organization is going to invest in the creation and distribution of information, it should realize the need for professional writing and editing services. Skilled communicators offer more than just polished prose and a few swept-up typos. A professional writer who understands the technology or market that he focuses on can generate valuable information, direction, and leadership to the critical thinkers in his and comparable technical or market specialties. Editors dispassionately review, revise, and re-proofread information with infinite care, ensuring that the final document is precisely what the writer intended.