Editing & Indexing | robin-richardson

Editing and Indexing

Though I chose the Technical Writing track in the Professional and Technical Writing graduate program, I wanted to round out my education with training in a few related areas, such as editing and indexing. I have already used what I learned in the editing classes extensively throughout the program and in professional settings. Though I haven’t created an index yet at work, I found indexing to be not only a useful skill to learn, but I also enjoyed the search for topics and related terms and the process of organizing them logically so users can find them easily in the index and the document.

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Editing

Harbor Style Guide

I created this guide in Word for Harbor Environmental & Safety for the class, Technical Style and Editing. The client wanted a document that outlined for all its employees the standards for the use of the Harbor logo, type styles and specifications, use of terminology, and other style issues that affect the consistency and professional appearance of Harbor materials. I initially met with my Harbor contact in person to discuss her needs and expectations for the project, and I regularly emailed her to give her status updates and ask questions when needed.

The Harbor Style Guide won UALR's Department of Rhetoric and Writing awards in 2015 for Best Editing Project and Best Graduate Writing.

Colton's Steak House & Grill® Job Position Manuals

Using Word, I edited and designed this series of eight manuals for Colton's Restaurant Group, Inc. (CRG) as a final project for Advanced Editing. Restaurant managers and trainers use these manuals for training and testing new employees of Colton's Steak House & Grill® franchises. I created the original manuals several years ago, and they needed to be updated and redesigned.

I consulted with the CRG Director of Operations to obtain information updates and took fresh photos to place in the manuals. I contacted the Director of Operations when I ran across information that seemed outdated or incorrect based on my own experience with the restaurant business. Because she needed the manuals by a particular time, I also kept her apprised of where I was in the process of editing and designing them. Once I finalized the color versions of the manuals, I created black-and-white versions to be posted on the CRG internal website and downloaded by mangers to print and use to train new employees. Colton’s trainers use the color versions to train employees when a new Colton’s location is opening.

Indexing

Index for Talking With Your Older Patient

This 61-page handbook is a National Institute of Health (NIH) publication for doctors written to help them talk to their older patients about health and lifestyle issues. The in-depth index, created in Word as a final project for Indexing, includes a Subject Index and an Organizations and Available Publications Index. I divided the indexes to reduce clutter in the Subject Index and to make it easier for readers to find information about a specific organization or publication because so many were mentioned in the handbook. I was close to finishing the index as a single entity when it became clear that separating the many organizations and publications would be a more effective way to help users locate subject information. By moving the organizations and publications information to a separate index, both indexes were cleaner, less cluttered, and more focused.

Index for What to Charge by Laurie Lewis

I enjoyed indexing when I took the class, so I created this index on my own to gain additional experience indexing books. I had read the 175-page book and found it informative, but it lacked an index. (I believe most all nonfiction books should have an index because good ones are often used as references later, and an index is a vital tool for locating specific information.)

Indexing a full-length book was a welcome challenge, but I had some difficulty deciding how to index the vast number of examples the author uses to teach her methods. I felt they were relevant enough to be included, but it was tough to determine the best way to clarify that they were examples of specific situations to be applied to learning Lewis's strategies. Because some examples go on for several pages to show how to do (or not do) something—for example, an entire chapter is devoted to a case study of how to successfully determine project rates—many pages of the book would be excluded from the index if examples were not somehow included. I experimented with different formatting, such as putting all examples in italic type, or making a separate "examples" heading. In the end, I included them under the appropriate subject headings as "example cases."

ROBIN F. RICHARDSON

TECHNICAL WRITER