Remember the Days

Are you a calendar watcher? If so, you’ll note that we have two important national holidays coming up: Memorial Day and Independence Day.

Unlike many holidays that may have worldwide religious significance or are based on an ancient heritage, these two are uniquely American days of remembrance. We set aside time each year to remember those who have died to keep our country safe and free.

It’s an honor to recount their deeds and sacrifices.

But without discounting the efforts of those fine men and women, the days leading up to those holidays could serve as a time for other victories (smaller victories, I’ll grant you, but victories nonetheless).

Why not use the days leading up to Memorial Day to form an alliance with champion project managers to make you a lean, mean, fighting machine through your projects?

Why not seize the days between Memorial Day and Independence Day to gain freedom from the verbose jargon and common errors that have crept into your communication?

Fighting the good fight

Sure, you’d like to beat back the enemies of disorganization and win the war against improper grammar and usage, but how? There are two key methods: assistance and training. ProEdit can help you with both.

Assistance is easy, whatever it is you need. Our in-house team excels in making your projects be the best they can be. Our services include:

• Editing
• Technical writing
• Marcom writing
• Proposal writing
• Instructional design
• Project management
• Graphic design
• Proofreading
• Web content writing

Our hard-working staff has extensive industry experience to put to work for you. For more information about our staff and referrals from former and current clients, go here to learn more about ProEdit's talented staff.

If you prefer to have on-site workers under your direct management, our staffing service can help you put the right people on your team. ProEdit is the largest and most experienced staffing firm in the writing and editing industry. Whether you are looking for a temporary contract worker or a permanent hire, we have more than 50,000 qualified candidates in our stable of trained professionals.

As for training, keep your eyes glued to this blog as our staff shares wisdom gained from years of experience to bring you helpful hints and practical tidbits, whether you’re a professional editor or not. We’ll be sure to cover frequent grammatical errors and various ways to improve your copy, as well as guidelines for everything from instructional design to technical writing.

Another less obvious way of retraining your editorial eye is simply to pay attention to the tracked changes in the documents you receive from your editors. Just watching the types of errors that are being corrected and what kind of word choices are being tweaked can help you create far better drafts for the next project. Just think of it as an independent study (even if you don’t get the course credit). 

Celebrate your independence

Prior to leaving the office for your multiple family reunions and cookouts during the upcoming holidays, make a mental note to celebrate your freedom of speech that our forebearers fought so hard to preserve by making your spoken and written communication as good and as correct as it can possible be.

When you’re ready to make that step, just let us know. We’ll have your back.  

Written by: Sean Taylor, ProEdit

For more information about ProEdit's services, contact us via the web or call 1-888-776-3348.  Need to add creative talent to your team?  Check out our nationwide candidate profiles.

School’s Out (Of the Classroom): The Rise of Informal and Social Learning

Ah, those last days of the school year when kids of any era go running down the halls singing one of Alice Cooper’s classic lines: “School’s out for summer!” (Don’t even pretend you didn’t. We know better.)

Perhaps though, Vincent Damon Furnier (Alice Cooper’s real name) was on to something. In many ways, particularly in business and corporate learning, school is out. While some formal classroom learning is still needed, estimates now say that 70 percent of learning is self-guided and informal (http://derekstockley.com.au/articles/informal-learning.html).

The learning needs of organizations have changed. Gone are the days of requiring a one-time event to prepare employees or students for a job or new tasks. Instead, the focus has shifted to ongoing, continuous training, with employees and clients being regularly updated with new learning and additional modules of knowledge.

As those needs have changed and grown, so have the methods for meeting them. 

What is Informal and Social Learning?

For starters, informal learning doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to dress for it in a “casual Friday” sort of way. Nor does it mean you should organize a get-together at the local sports bar with your friends in order to prepare for it.

Some proponents of informal learning have described it as anything that doesn’t involve classrooms or curriculum, and for a broad-stroke definition, that’s not a bad place to start.

But at its heart, informal learning primarily has to do with who controls the delivery of information. If formal learning is defined by having an instructor and a curriculum that is delivered the same way at the same place to each learner, then informal learning can be described as being controlled by the student and delivered at his or her pace through a variety of means—ranging from on-the-job training to audio and video to eLearning.

Why the informality?

The simple answer is just this—because it works. Informal learning works for learners, and it works for organizations. But let’s dig deeper to examine why it works.

For learners, it works because it puts them in control of the learning environment and pace. A survey at the University of Pittsburgh found that the top three reasons learners would rather learn on their own include:

• Desire to set my own learning pace
• Desire to use my own style of learning
• Desire to keep the learning strategy flexible and easy-to-change http://www.knowledgejump.com/learning/characteristics.html) 

In short, it feels more natural to them. It meets them where they are and in the way they learn. To draw from the cliché, it doesn’t force a bunch of square pegs into round holes.

For organizations, the benefits are primarily driven by the bottom line—especially in regard to time and money. Putting together major training events is expensive when you have to get a large group of people together, house them, feed them, and manage them. Even if you cut much of the costs by arranging virtual events, getting a large group to free up the same set of hours is about as easy as catching water in a net.

Informal options, such as eLearning courses, offer a cheaper and more adaptable option that enables each member of that large group to get the same training when it fits his or her schedule and without the expense of having a live, flesh-and-blood classroom meeting.

But it goes beyond that.

Today’s companies move faster than ever before and face changes on a day-in and day-out (and often hour-by-hour) time frame. It’s just not practical to constantly bring people back in every day or every week for updates as goals, tasks, or deliverables change. However, a quick update to an online interactive course followed by a targeted email, and poof, everyone who needs to be updated can be in a quick time frame and at minimal expense.

Old school, new school, e-school, your school

Learning still happens in a variety of ways. There’s still an occasional need for formal, classroom learning, but more and more there’s a growing need for informal delivery methods that enable your learners to work in a way that is most effective for them.

As the world becomes more electronically connected, such learning will continue to become e-focused and delivered through intranets and the Internet. But what will help you more than anything else is this—think of your learners first and what will make the knowledge you want to teach them move from their heads and into practice, even if it requires you to consider alternatives you may never have before.

Written by:  Sean Taylor, ProEdit

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Take a Second Look: Avoiding Editorial Errors

You finally did it! You put in the time, the money, the effort, and now you have something to show for it: the product. All you have left to do is to get it into the hands of customers. Unfortunately though, without a professional presentation, your product won’t even make it to a vendor. But before you go spend the rest of your budget on flashy sales gimmicks, take a second look at your presentation. Will it gain the attention and respect of the buyer? The answer to this question and the key to your success could lie in a simple proofread.

Often, companies spend their entire budgets on research, development, and production, only to cut corners when it’s time to write a proposal. To meet deadlines and stay under budget, a project manager with no formal writing experience might type up a plan and run a quick spell check. No mistakes? Fantastic. Run the presses and send it off before the office closes. But wait, there’s a problem. Automated spelling and grammar checks don’t catch every mistake.

For example, that manager means to start a sentence with “Whether friends and your family,” but instead, being in a rush, he writes “Weather fiends and you’re family” The buyers receive the proposal and immediately jump to the conclusion that either A) the company is accusing them of being related to a gang of cut-throat rainstorms or B) the company lacks the professionalism to properly edit documents.

That company’s product might be exactly what the buyers need; however, the buyers never make it past the errors to see what the company has to offer. Pardon the pun, but they can’t see the sunshine for all the rain. Eventually, that company is going to have to learn how to professionally edit documents, hire professional editors, or suffer everlasting bad business.

Sales proposals, however, aren’t the only types of documents you should submit for professional editing. Businesses need websites, and these websites should be free of errors. As a service or product provider, you are constantly trying to sell while consumers are constantly looking to buy. The Internet has made this relationship easier than ever. With a simple query into a search engine, consumers can find your business within seconds. If the visitors see typos or poorly constructed sentences, they are likely to leave your website to find something more professional that might meet their needs.

Editing is vital to every form of writing. Neglecting to edit will always yield negative or no results, regardless of content. Students who express complex concepts but fail to properly edit will make worse grades than those who do edit, even if the ideas are less developed. Job applicants with outstanding education and experience whose résumés contain misspelled words or incorrect punctuation are not likely to be contacted for an interview.

Regardless of deadlines or budget limits, editing should never be neglected. You may not be willing to give up your time looking over a document you just finished. It may be more work than you want to put in. In these cases, there are companies and individuals who will edit for you. This can even be more helpful than editing your own work. Because they are not familiar with your ideas and style, they tend to catch your mistakes more easily. Plus, it’s their job to do a good job. Remember that you have spent all of your resources on developing a product, a service, a grade, or even yourself. Why not spend the time, the effort, or the funds to ensure your work is correct and sounds great? It never hurts to take a second look.

Request a ProEdit price quote for your editing project or give us a call at 1-888-776-3348.

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Branding: Your Message Needs a Word Tuxedo

Did you watch the royal wedding?

Think of what you didn’t see amidst all the grandeur and pomp and beauty: not one single pair of blue jeans, not one tank top, not one T-shirt with a funny caption. Why not? Because the dress code matched the event—formal, fancy, classy. Anything less than a suit or a tuxedo would have been out of place. Imagine jeans, tank tops, and funny T-shirts scattered throughout the church. That would have created a far different atmosphere and knocked formal, fancy, and classy down to informal, casual, and tacky.

What does this have to do with editing and branding?
Just like the wrong dress code can reduce a royal wedding extravaganza to a stereotypical shotgun wedding, the wrong dress code in your business communication can reduce your professional, informative, and unique company image to something cheap, unhelpful, and commonplace.

How do you dress your business communication properly to send the right message? Make sure your work has had “alterations” for the best fit. Only instead of seams and fabrics, use the tools of proofreading and editing.

Proofreading – Getting Rid of the Wrong
“But I ran it through spell check,” some may say. Well, as nice a tool as spell check is, it falls short in one vital area—it doesn’t think for itself. It’s only as good as its dictionary. Because of that, trusting it to make your copy foolproof is a risky proposition.

For example, spell check fails to understand the differences between “it’s” and “its” (though it does mark it while you’re typing, be careful—it’s often trying to “correct” it into a wrong usage) or “they’re” and “their” and “there.” It also doesn’t catch the common mistyping of words like “or” for “of” and “up” for “us.” And that’s the just the beginning. When it comes to proper usage, it doesn’t recognize the differences between “which” and “that” or “less than” and “under,” among other common grammatical mistakes.

Just ask the editors of the Brigham Young University student paper. In 2009, they trusted spell check to “proofread” their copy and accidently accepted the word “apostate” for a misspelling of “apostle.” Then they went to press without proofreading the “corrected” text—and quickly recalled 18,000 copies of the paper (http://www.sunjournal.com/node/85717). As honest a mistake as it was, it did cause the paper a lot of embarrassment.

Suppose you’re driving home and pass a billboard that reads “Better then our competitors.” That’s not exactly going to fill you with confidence in that company’s ability to do its job.  It doesn’t matter if that job is laying bricks and has nothing to do with writing or editing. It still reflects poorly on that company’s quality of work. “I wonder if they hurry through their brickwork too, and make similar mistakes,” you might think.  Sure, it is a simple mistake and a common error, but it speaks volumes about the business that made it. In other words, it hurt the brand in the eyes of a potential client.

The bottom line: Read your work to proofread it. Sure, use spell check and grammar checkers as tools, but yours must be the mind at work behind them to think beyond where their abilities stop short.

Editing – Making What’s Right Even Better
There’s a common misconception that editing and proofreading are just two ways of saying the same idea. The truth, however, is that editing picks up where proofreading ends.  Editing goes beyond correcting spelling and grammar to make your copy the best it can be. (To continue our analogy of getting dressed for the royal wedding, think of proofreading as taking a shower and getting clean—the basics—and editing as visiting your closet to choose the right suit or dress—adding the finishing touches to look your best.)

Good editing looks at style, tone, and voice. It makes sure your professional company has a professional image. It makes sure your casual surf shop has a casual tone in your communication. It makes sure your instructional copy is easy-to-follow and written simply and directly.

Good editing aims first for the ultimate goal of any written message—understanding. It aims for the simple instead of the verbose, the clearly defined instead of the esoteric, and the concrete instead of the abstract. It enables you to speak plain language to the average person rather than speaking jargon understandable only to those with doctorates in your field. Good editing helps you “determine the best options” rather than “delineate the most advantageous possibilities intrinsic to the market.”

Taking the time to edit your documents (or have them edited by someone else) will ensure your brand maintains the image you want to show off to your current and potential clients.

We’re often told that we “clean up well” when we put on something nice to wear, which for me usually means a coat and tie. It’s a cliché, but it’s true. When I go out, I want to put my best foot forward and talk and dress in a way that says something about me. In a word, I “edit” myself to send the right message.

Put Your Message on the Best Dressed List
Are you looking to improve your company's communication and ensure that your brand is seen in the appropriate light? Don’t let simple, common errors undermine your materials. Make sure to get your point across clearly and directly, and don’t hinder your message with a tone, style, and voice that doesn’t match your image.

In short, don’t show up at the royal wedding in jeans and a T-shirt.  It’s not pretty, and you’ll get all the wrong kind of attention.

Written by: Sean Taylor, ProEdit

Request a price quote for your editing project or give us a call at 1-888-776-3348.

Learn about ProEdit's services.

Friday the 13th: The Revenge of Project Killers

What’s worse than Friday the 13th? The sequels.

Okay, that was a cheap shot, but now that I have your attention, what’s really worse than Friday the 13th—even worse than having a black cat cross your path under a ladder? Falling prey to superstitious assumptions when we should know better.

Before you think we’re talking about tossing salt over your shoulder or staying away from cracked mirrors, we’re not. We’re talking about the assumptions that affect your writing.

Sure, they may not be fully recognized superstitions yet, but they’re definitely myths that sneak into attitudes about the communication process for many writers, editors, presenters and instructors. They lurk around the corners of our minds and are always looking for ways to creep in and kill our effectiveness when it comes to communication projects.

So, what are some of these “Friday the 13th” project killers we need to look out for?

Project Killer #1 – I’ve done this course dozens of times. I don’t really need an instructional designer to fix it. It’s fine like it is.

There’s a lot of truth to the cliché “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But in many cases, something that “ain’t broke” can be made more effective with tweaking, especially when it’s going from one format (i.e., PowerPoint slides and a live presenter) to another (computer-based training). Think of it this way—even a best-selling novel has to be changed into a script before it can dominate the box office as a movie. So why shouldn’t your already successful course be adapted into an eLearning format so it can further engage the minds of your learners?

Project Killer #2 – Project managers are just an unnecessary step to slow us down. I can oversee this project just fine.

You’re already in charge of so much. Do you really want to add another hoop to jump through? A project manager can take care of the day-to-day details of keeping a project on track without the distractions that already take up so much of your time. Then you get to come in and deal with content when it’s ready to be seen instead of being bombarded by the trifling minutiae that can bog you and the project down.

Project Killer #3 – Why should I send this out to an editor? I ran it through spelling and grammar check.

Spell check is only as good as its dictionary. (Spell check actually flagged “its” as incorrect in the previous sentence in favor of the conjunction “it’s.”) It only recognizes misspellings, so words that can be spelled different ways (i.e., they’re, there, their) don’t get any help from spell check. Neither do words that are commonly mistyped (such as “up” for “us” or “of” for "off”). Furthermore, neither spell check nor grammar check helps you communicate better by tightening your writing, making better word choices, shifting from passive to active sentences, or replacing jargon with regular human speech.

Why is it so important to be careful with these project killers lurking about in the shadows? Well, unlike summer blockbusters or the latest action thriller, not all of your projects get a sequel. If you don’t get them right the first time, there might not be a handy black cat or convenient Friday the 13th to blame.

Written by: Sean Taylor, ProEdit

Avoid these Project Killers - learn more about ProEdit's services or give us a call at 1-888-776-3348.