As discussed in the previous sections, taking a rhetorical approach to technical communication includes focusing on the process alongside the product. This process is sometimes “messy,” often collaborative, and always iterative. Editing and revising are two important parts of the process for technical communicators. Just as communication, and writing in particular, is recursive, revising and editing often happen more than once for a given text. Revising might be part of your later writing stages, or it may happen early on in your process. Whenever revision happens in the process of creating a specific text, it is important to practice revision and editing with your specific audience in mind.

When editing or revising a document, you must understand the rhetorical situation. Making revision choices often involves a clear, specific understanding of your target audience, context, and purpose. Just like the beginning stages of writing, revising is rhetorical. Revising and editing are also very often collaborative; frequently, revisions respond to feedback from an editor, from sample readers, or from target users. Usability testing (which we discuss in-depth in cluster 4.3) is one way to receive feedback that can guide revisions. Usability testing involves observing users as they interact with a text and directly or indirectly gathering feedback based on how they interact with that text. For example, if you are creating a set of instructions for assembling a chair, usability testing might involve observing users as they work to assemble that chair and taking not of how they use the instructions, where they run into trouble, and how long it takes them to complete the task.

Just as editing and revising are rhetorical, they should also be guided by considerations of equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility. When soliciting feedback, for example, consider who is represented as a potential audience member, reader, or user. Consider how you can seek out feedback from users that include diverse perspectives, and consider how you can revise with your specific audience–their needs, contexts, cultures, and perspectives–in mind.

When creating a text, you are likely going to be guided and influenced by your own biases and your own lens. Your biases refer to your beliefs and world views, and even when you work towards being objective, you can never completely remove your bias. Your lens refers to the way that you move through the world and the way that you incorporate new information into your already existing, complex narrative of “how things work.” Biases and lenses can be considered roadblocks for technical communicators, but they are also necessary parts of our own subjective experiences and understandings. Consider how infants approach each new task, and then consider how adults approach each new task. Most adults already have a mental “map” that allows them to make choices and decisions, and this map is based on past experiences and world views (which are also tied up in what we call biases and lenses).

However, while such past experience can be important and useful as you work to solve new problems, you have to remember that your audience likely has different past experiences, different biases, and different lenses. Understanding the rhetorical nature of communication involves working to make choices based on how your audience moves through the world and solves problems, knowing that you cannot count only on your own experience to know those things. For this reason, it is important to not only “put yourself in the place of your audience” but to actually get feedback from other readers and users.

It is a technical communicator’s job to gather feedback from target users; part of this job involves listening to feedback openly and specifically partnering with users who may be historically or currently underrepresented. Consider, for example, a technical communicator who is tasked with creating infographics for patients and their families at a children’s emergency room that explains masking policies and procedures. If the patients at this ER include English and Spanish-speaking families, then it is important to seek out feedback from individuals who part of these communities. Understanding who your audience is, and being sure to collaborative with that audience, is an important part of the revision process, and technical communicators must work to make information accessible.

As you revise and editing your work, continue to reflect on these processes as rhetorical and as engaged in equity and inclusion. In the rest of this section, we discuss the distinctions between revising and editing.

Revision

Revision (or revising) often refers to global, content-related changes (as opposed to sentence-level, style, or grammatical changes). In this text, we will use revision to refer to more substantive changes in content or style, and editing to refer to more local changes, or changes that align your text with various specific guidelines and requirements.

As mentioned above, revising is nearly always a collaborative task. It can be very difficult to revise your own work. Practice makes this process easier, and there are various strategies that can help. Some strategies include reading something out loud to yourself, along with giving yourself ‘space’ and ‘time’ between drafting and revising so that you are better able to approach your text as an outside reader might. It is generally easier, for example, to revise a document that you created last week than it is to revise a document that you created earlier today. Although these strategies can make it easier to revise your own work, it is often important to ask someone else to read through your text and to provide feedback or suggestions (this is where usability testing or peer review become so important!). Finally, you are likely to work with professional, dedicated editors for important, long term projects. Even when you work collaboratively to create a document, gathering feedback from readers or users outside that team can give you a new perspective on how that text might be revised and improved.

Of course, if you are writing something quickly, or if you do not have the means to reach out to another reader or editor, it is still important to edit and revise your own work. This is where your skills in articulating a rhetorical situation come in handy. When editing and revising, imagine the specific needs and expectations of your audience, given the context and purpose of your text.

Just as it is useful to sketch out a rhetorical situation before you begin to write, revisiting that situation–especially considerations of audience–is an important step during revision. Even if you are revising something quickly, keep your target audience in mind. Of course, interacting with a text “as the target audience” is very difficult, since it involves pretending to be someone else, with a different set of world views and biases and experiences. Further, as composers, we generally have a different understanding of the communication process than we do as audience members. Often, technical communicators are either experts on the content or are working very close with subject matter experts to reach a specific audience. That audience may be less familiar with the content, may have different time constraints or road blocks or other considerations that impact how they interact with that text.

When revising a text, consider what the target audience needs to know, what they already know, and how they will access the document. Imagine yourself as the reader: how would you want the document to be organized? How might summaries, repetition, and headings help you to approach the text? If you had to quickly scan the text for information, could you do that? Is it better to have more, short paragraphs, or a bulleted list, or even a chart or image? Consider all the modes of communication, and try to make things as easy on your reader as possible. And, again, work to seek feedback from your target audience as part of this process. Be flexible and open-minded, and listen to that feedback. If users report that something in your text is confusing, then work with them to make it less confusing (rather than relying only on whether you find that content confusing). As much as you can work to imagine yourself in your target audience’s position, it is more important to listen to and incorporate feedback from members of that audience.

For more strategies on revising, and to get a sense of how revision fits into the writing process, take a look at the Purdue OWL’s “Steps for Revising Your Paper”.

Editing

While revision refers to more substantive changes in a text, like the organization or major chunks of content, editing refers to more detail-oriented, often sentence-level changes. Editing often takes place towards the final stages of a document, after more global changes have already been made. In some cases, the technical communicators who created a document also work to edit that document. In other cases, a separate team of editors will work on a document that they did not create. Editing content that has already been created is a common role for professional and technical communicators; developing close reading skills and becoming familiar with approaches to technical editing are crucial.

Editing is a similar task and requires similar skills to proofreading, which focus on clarity and usability by paying close attention to local aspects of a document. See this helpful information from the Purdue OWL about editing and proofreading.  Editing and proofreading involve looking at the structure and technical aspects of your writing, including sentence structure, organization, clarity, grammar, spelling, punctuation, and document design. Proofreading and editing are important, but generally should happen after more substantial revisions take place.

During the editing stages of the writing process. technical communicators might need to conform to a specific style guide, such as APA or MLA, or an internal style guide specific to their organization. Style guides help documents to conform to the expectations of a very specific audience. They provide guidelines for things such as citation practices, heading styles, language usage, and visuals. While learning a particular style can be important, it is more important to know how to follow style guides in general, since the particular style will likely change if you move from one professional organization to the next, or as you write for different audiences. For example, some publications require that writers use MLA style, and some require APA style. While it’s helpful to become generally familiar with each style, it’s more useful to know where to look for guidance and how to adapt to various style guides.