Technical Editors: Going Beyond the Red Pen

An editor’s responsibility is to ensure successful data transmission, analysis, and interpretation from the text to the audience by implementing correct grammar, spelling, sentence structure, and punctuation. An editor also is an organizer who ensures that all the necessary components of the product are included and these components are in the correct order that suites the learning needs of the desired audience. In addition, an editor is a product designer; he or she holds much of the final decision-making in how a product looks from the cover to the illustrations within the product and any associated supplementary material. Finally, an editor plays the role of a business negotiator, as he or she seeks the best prices for outside publishing vendors for permissions requests, photo purchasing, and hiring freelance writers/editors for specific projects.

In the case mentioned above, editors would be forced to hand over incomprehensible work to someone else more qualified, or would have to seek advice from someone more experienced (higher management). In my personal experience, there were a few occasions when I came across a hefty amount of statistical data, more than what I was used to editing. I was very hesitant to go ahead with the editing process because I feared that my revisions would change the meaning of the data or would make it totally incomprehensible to the audience. I therefore sought advice from our medical editor who was not only a good writer, but also had a medical degree specializing in that same field and was a lead investigator in several clinical trials.However at some times, these medical editors (who are also full-time physicians) are so busy with their schedule that at times they are not able to reply to my questions in time before the deadline, which makes fulfillment of my roles all the more challenging.