Proofreading Tips for Technical Writers
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User documentation is the face your company shows to the world. Having quality manuals is just as important as having a great support team. Remember, a lot of issues get deflected without actual involvement of support if documentation is okay. Plus, support teams work with users based on documentation for the most part anyway.
It goes without saying that user manuals need to be correct and precise. We would also like to add that they should look professional because the image of your whole company is at stake here. Talking about professionally looking docs – check out this blog post on user documentation design tips, you might find some helpful information there for your particular use case.
Returning to our topic, we believe that proofreading is a very important stage of writing technical documentation. Proofreading includes checking the structure, logic, grammar, spelling, punctuation, spaces, etc. In this article, we will provide some practical advice on proofreading you can apply in your work.
The choice of a person to do proofreading is different for every team. The ideal situation is, of course, to have a responsible person assigned specifically to this task.
Another way of dealing with proofreading is exchanging texts with peers in your team. But this approach is not very convenient because everyone would need to drop their current tasks and preoccupy themselves with proofreading…
Quite often, technical writers proofread their own texts without any help from the outside. It is much more difficult to proofread your own text, but it saves the company money and resources.
Okay, so, now, we see who can proofread. The next step is to figure out the most efficient ways of doing this.
Regardless of whether the text is written by you or not, there are some best practices you should try out to have the best outcome:
If you think about it, in technical writing proofreading is almost as important as the writing part. So, one must approach it seriously. Of course, even without thorough proofreading, all typos and mistakes will be eventually fixed, as they will be noticed later – by readers. And, we really don’t want this reputation damage. To improve your proofreading, feel free to apply our pieces of advice in your help authoring process, and, if you have any useful tips to share, leave them in comments below.
Good luck with your technical writing!
ClickHelp Team
Author, host and deliver documentation across platforms and devices
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