Schreiber researching best practices for technical editors

May 19, 2021

Dr. Joanna Schreiber’s proposal for an undergraduate research assistant has been funded, and she will continue to work with Writing and Linguistics major Sedona Benjamin on her Trends in Professional and Technical Editing project. The research involves interviewing and surveying editors and editing instructors about emerging best practices for technical editors and editing pedagogy. Because published theoretical frameworks for technical editing work have changed little in the last two decades, Dr. Schreiber hopes to find out what best practices are being used on the job to guide information quality and accuracy, emerging content strategy practices, information accessibility, and inclusive content. She hopes to use her findings to update theoretical frameworks for editing instructors and future technical editors. 
Dr. Schreiber and Sedona Benjamin have recently been accepted to present preliminary findings of this study at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group for Design of Communication (SIGDOC) in Fall 2021. They are co-authoring a paper titled “Updating Technical Editing Models for Accessibility and Advocacy.”