Zohra : 0:04

Hello folks, welcome to Season 5 of Inside Techcom with Zahra Mudabana. This season, we are focusing on tools, tips and strategies to elevate your craft. Let's dive right in. Hello listeners, welcome to another episode of Inside Techcom with Zahra Mutabana. Today, I have a guest who we've had before in season three Kim Campbell. Kim is a linguist who has been studying workplace language for more than 30 years. She joined the Department of Technical Communication at the University of North Texas in 2016. And she continues to serve in the role of Director of Corporate Relations. She promotes constructive interactions among industry professionals, and we're going to talk about that with the students and faculty. When she isn't doing research or teaching, you'll find her cooking, watching movies, and the next thing that she's going to do right after this show is go and enjoy a swim, a nice pool swim, but we are going to be talking a bit before that can happen. So, kim, welcome to my show. How are you doing today?

Kim Campbell: 1:12

I'm terrific, Zora. Thank you so much for having me.

Zohra : 1:15

Of course it's a privilege. In the intro I forgot to mention that we are going to be talking about technical editing today right.

Kim Campbell: 1:22

It's something that I have been interested in since before I got my PhD. That was a long time ago in 1990. So it's a course that I teach regularly at the University of North Texas. So it's a topic that I'm familiar with and invested in.

Zohra : 1:40

We should all be invested in, and who better than you, of course. Now, kim, you need no introduction and you've been on my show, but I think maybe you can add more color to what I added.

Kim Campbell: 1:53

Thank you for allowing me. So I am Kim Sido-Campbell. I did get a PhD from LSU go Tigers, go Tigers. In 1990. And I was interested in linguistics really before I did a PhD. But I also wanted to do something pragmatic. I grew up in Nebraska farm family. I need to be able to dig in the dirt and actually make something grow, and so I love the intellectual challenge of linguistics. But I wanted to be able to apply it in the real world, and so I'm very interested in how language works in the workplace, and that's what led me to TechCom. I also worked as an editor while I was getting my PhD and then I edited a research journal for the IEEE for more than 10 years during my career. So editing, as I said, it's a definite interest of mine.

Zohra : 2:50

Well, who better than you, then, to be talking to us about technical editing, because I think AI generated content becoming more commonplace. I believe that technical editing should be front and center as human oversight comes into place again.

Kim Campbell: 3:07

Absolutely true. Well, I intend to say some things about that later.

Zohra : 3:12

I can't wait to hear what your thoughts are. So thank you for adding more color to the intro. I love to hear the backstory. What brought you here? It's always good to know a little bit more about the guest. And I thought I would be a linguist. I speak a few languages and I believe I am a what's the word a? Polyglot. But I had to take a course in linguistics when I was at Northeastern, one of the best courses that I ever took. I realized that, yes, my love for languages is sort of just innate, and what better than you know one linguist to another. Maybe someday we'll talk more about linguistics, but it's a dream of mine to maybe do a PhD in linguistics at some point when I've earned my money. Then maybe I'll circle back to school.

Kim Campbell: 3:56

I love that, Zora. I didn't know that and I'm happy to give you suggestions if you decide to pursue that.

Zohra : 4:02

Well, I will take you up on that offline. Thank you, kim. All right back to our conversation about technical editing. Kim, tell us in your words what is technical editing, just to kind of level set.

Kim Campbell: 4:14

So what I do when I teach students is I really just take a dictionary definition, something like from Merriam-Webster, and I want them to recognize that there's more than one definition. So, for example, in this case Merriam-Webster has three, but what I do is I specialize their definition or make it apply to technical content. So preparing material for publication or public presentation is something you're doing when you're perhaps copy editing a user guide. That's one definition. Another definition is assembling by cutting and rearranging, and so you could think of that. Maybe that's especially easy to understand if you're thinking about creating a video where you're editing a webinar that happened and your job is to cut the parts that aren't relevant. I'm guessing you know all about this as a podcast host. So cutting and rearranging things is also editing.

Kim Campbell: 5:16

Third and final definition from Merriam-Webster has to do with altering or adapting or refining material in order to make it conform to a standard. So in many ways, I think of this as the best of the three options for defining what editing means. In TACOM, one example would be taking material and editing it so that it conforms to data types, right. So that's how I define editing when it comes to being an editor, a technical editor. Really, all editors are intermediaries, so they're not the people who own the content and they're not the audience that is going to get the content in order to use it. They're the person who stands in between and their job is to deal with that intersection, so helping whoever the owner of the content is get it ready so that it will do what they want it to do for their audience.

Zohra : 6:22

Awesome, thank you. And yes, I believe, especially with my podcast editing I don't personally edit. I have a great audio engineer who does it for me. His name is RJ. A shout out to him. I send it, sometimes on a Sunday and I'll say, hey, I want it on a Monday and he'll get it back to me with my audio notes, of course, but he does a great job. So a big shout out to you, rj.

Zohra : 6:44

But yes, editing it's a painstaking job. It requires patience, I believe and I think you brought that out in the definition and you sit at that intersection, especially when you are in a corporate role. I would say, and I really appreciate you, I guess, mentioning that editors are not the owners of content, because I've had the good fortune of working with some good technical editors way back when I started my career. Unfortunately, that is not the norm anymore, but I believe that maybe this role is going to evolve where authors themselves will be technical editors, or we at least need to refine and develop that skill and I think I have that in my list of questions, if it doesn't escape me, and hopefully we'll talk about it. But I do believe that the content, especially in technical communications, that content is not owned by the author or by the editor, but it's a more collective ownership. It's like a product you're trying to deliver.

Kim Campbell: 7:46

Yes, it is Absolutely.

Zohra : 7:48

In that regard, we have to approach the editorial feedback with a sense of respect. I would say where it's not, yes, when you get feedback as an author, you have the decision on how you want to frame the sentence. But if you feel like you're being challenged, then talking to your editor and coming up with why something may be suggested to you and if it makes sense, if it is not a subjective feedback, then I suggest we keep our minds open to it and it goes vice versa. So I think you just brought out that beautiful nuance to how content flows through these different roles to how content flows.

Kim Campbell: 8:25

through these different roles, I teach my students three things that an editor needs to either have or develop. The first is a healthy editorial ego, and what I mean by that is they need to be able to recognize they do not own this content. They're not the author. And although that sounds simple, in practice it's not always easy for people who think they want to be editors to recognize the boundary between their contributions and the author's. And if we're talking about a tech pubs department, clearly the author is a corporate author. It's not even an individual. It's the content, the knowledge that is owned by the various people who are involved in creating a product. So that's number one I teach them They've got to have a healthy editorial ego. Number two, they have to be able to recognize the difference between requirements based on a standard and preferences based on personal taste.

Kim Campbell: 9:31

This is also something of an obstacle for many people who think they want to be an editor. They have not surprisingly, most editors have very strong linguistic skills when it comes to writing and they don't usually recognize that they have their own style, and their own style is not the end-all, be-all. And so, number two, they have to be able to recognize that there are standards. Their job is to enforce the standard, not their own personal taste.

Kim Campbell: 10:04

The third thing that I teach them you touched on all of these, but the third thing is they have to develop a knowledge of the relevant standard and also be able to communicate in a professional way what knowledge of that standard says about a certain change. So this has to do with when you're dealing with an author or a reviewer or anybody else in the process who wants to make a change against the standard. Then it's the editor's job to intervene and say why that's not a preferred way of managing whatever the change might be, whether it's style or design or mechanics or whatever it happens to be. So those three things are very important and they're kind of the centerpiece of when I teach tech editing. That's the centerpiece of everything we do. All the assignments are meant to help them develop or recognize these ideas.

Zohra : 11:06

Thank you for pulling it all together with the specifics, because my head can be in the cloud when I'm talking sometimes. And to be specific about what you meant when I said subjective right, you gave that context, and especially in a tech pubs department where that context becomes important. Now I did publish a book last year and that was my personal book. So when I got editorial feedback there, the context and the back and forth was very different from the way I would probably interact with my technical editor. So the context also becomes extremely important. But thanks for the specifics. I want to dive right into my next question. One of the things that I encountered when I published my book was copy editing. That wasn't really technical editing and I want to call out that difference. What is that difference and where is each applicable? I think technical editing is more. We've been talking about it. So I think the context is there, but any information you can share about the two, the difference and where you might encounter both together.

Kim Campbell: 12:08

I have a bunch of answers to that particular question, so I don't know if I can give you one. I think I'm going to have to give you a little bit of each of them. So when you talk about copy editing versus technical editing, in my mind you're comparing apples with oranges. I think maybe what you mean by copy editing is the process of editing that goes into a traditional publisher's workflow. So when most people think of editors, what they think of is exactly that a copy editor who works for a publishing house and the product that entity creates is a book or a magazine or a newspaper or whatever. Right, that is their product, that's what they sell. So traditionally, I guess we would say that's where editors have worked. I think copy editors are particularly. It's the one kind of editor that everybody knows about. But even in a publishing house there are levels of editors, just like there are levels of editing that we would talk about in tech comms. So in a publishing house, for example, there's an acquisitions editor, there's a permissions editor. Those people have very different roles from copy editors and it's the same in tech comm, or at least it used to be the same in tech comm, where you had different people who were the copy editors, who also were. They weren't called copy editors, they were called editors, right, and they were really often team leads, who would be the person most responsible for taking the work of the authors and being the quality check. So I also emphasize that tech editing is all about a quality process. It's all related to quality assurance and this is not a unique idea to me. There's actually a really good article that was in STC's research journal way back in like 2002 about technical editing as quality assurance. I always assign that reading to my students because it's a really good explanation of how, in a tech pub's context, technical editing works.

Kim Campbell: 14:31

So if I go back to your question about copy editing versus technical editing, what I would say is the real distinction is between whether you're a traditional publisher, like a book, magazine, whatever versus a non-traditional publisher, which is everybody else right. So when the internet happened to all of us, everybody became a publisher. Every company now is a publisher, including the companies that create complicated products that require technical communicators to manage giving users content that helps them use those products. So partly we're talking about the difference between the type of entity, the type of organization, but I also think that we're talking about the difference between levels of edit, just like in the publishing house, where you have an acquisitions editor, you have a developmental editor, you have a copy editor, you have a proofreader. Well, those are all distinct jobs in a traditional publisher.

Kim Campbell: 15:37

In tech comm the idea of levels of edit I think most people attribute it to JPL. Do you know what I'm talking about? The Jet Propulsion Lab, caltech, the people who worked as editors at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Lab. So these are the folks that did rockets for NASA. Right Back in the 1980s, several of those editors disclosed one of their best practices, which was called levelss of Edit.

Kim Campbell: 16:06

So they published this piece and I'm not going to go into the different levels because it's too complicated. There's nine different levels. I let my students know about the fact that there are these levels just to introduce them to the idea that there isn't one person or one kind of task that's involved in editing technical content. There are many, and that's what happens today. I also expose people to the Editorial Association of Canada. They have standards for editing and I'll be happy to share those link with you so you can share it with your audience. It's an excellent, excellent introduction to editing. They're not interested really in the type of industry that the editor works in, or in the type of content or the medium, the channel their information is designed to apply to anybody who's involved in editing. So I simplify their stuff a little bit by saying that there are three levels of edit.

Kim Campbell: 17:13

One is they call it structural, some people call it developmental. There's not about words or pictures or anything else. It's about ideas. It's about content and organization. So the discussion that a developmental editor has with someone is what pieces of information do you need to develop to put into this message? What order should you arrange those in? They may look at drafts, but they don't look at anything like style or mechanics or even design beyond the sense of what order should things go in. And maybe we should have a, you should develop a graphic here, or you right? But it's very much about content and I I think that this happens in tech pubs. You tell me I think this happens in tech pub departments with an author and their team lead, I'm guessing, or maybe with their peers, I'm not sure. It depends on how the team. It depends on who else would know about the content that that particular author is dealing with. You know they're collecting things right from the engineers or the developers and from whatever else from the product itself, wherever they can get information from audience need.

Kim Campbell: 18:33

Somebody's got to decide how much and what information needs to go into this bulletin or this release note or this user guide or this quick start guide whatever it is that you're creating and those discussions should be separate from copy editing. If you think about why, why do they need to be separate? It's because time matters, and if you're worrying about words that aren't going to be used, then that is true inefficiency. If you're editing at the level of the words someone is using or the style they're using, that may not make it to the final draft, so why would you waste your time? This is something that not only technical authors need to understand, and I think with the AI generated content, this becomes more and more, whatever more important, because part of what this developmental or structural editing part of what should be happening is part of. It should be going into the prompts or the interface your organization has created for using generative AI so that you get better content out. If you don't, then at that time it's not the time for you to tell the AI you didn't use British punctuation. It's the time to tell it you're missing this piece of content. Add it and then I'll come back to you.

Kim Campbell: 20:06

Understanding that there are levels to the editing is super important. First level developmental or structural. Second level is what most people think of when they think editing. That's the copy editing. Some people call that line editing. Some people separate line and style editing. I don't think for our purposes, our audience, it matters. But these are the people who are concerned with style and with mechanics and with standards. You know a style guide. So how does our style guide say? What word are we supposed to use to refer to the product? Or how do we address our users? What do we call them? Those kinds of issues. I think that's easy for people to understand.

Kim Campbell: 20:49

The third level of edit is something that's really specific to print. I'm not sure how relevant it is in the digital world, but proofreaders are the people who have the last pass. Once the author and the copy editor have decided this is the text we're going to use, then the proofreader is the one who comes back and looks at how this looks on the page, like do you have widows and orphans? Are the headings all in the right format at the right level those kinds of issues. So I don't think proofreading is really that relevant anymore, unless you're going to work for a traditional publisher. So does that help answer? It's a really long answer.

Zohra : 21:31

No, I'm so glad that you condensed it and gave it a structure. Quote unquote, because this is distilled. This is a distilled version and I think it really covers the gamut of what an editing process can look like. So you actually saved me time, because that was one of my questions what does the editing process look like in your world? So you gave a great breakdown of that process and I think I wanted to answer your question about the structural part of the editing process. I think, in my role, I would say it's a collective process, because you're developing a product and it requires collaboration and conversation.

Zohra : 22:08

In my current role, I work with my product managers. Shout out to my amazing product managers. They do a brilliant job of creating user stories. We follow the agile process and they have user stories. They have the scope defined there. You work with developers, but the user story gives you a context of what you really want to talk about, so the ideation comes from there. That is your inspiration.

Zohra : 22:31

So collaboration, in my opinion, is key, no matter whether you're an author or an editor. You need to have that dialogue. You cannot work in your silo and just throw it off the wall and say, hey, review my work, and say, hey, review my work. That's not going to work. It has to be a dialogue, because sometimes what's in your head may not be communicated in the content that you're sending to your team to review. So having that open conversation allows for that information to flow and that will give you the structure, the context, the audience, all of that. But a lot of that is also documented. Fortunately, in my current role I've been in a company where that was not the case and it was like pulling my teeth Because developers there was no product. You work directly with engineers and the engineers were at least at this company. The culture was not where we got information easily, so we had to come up with that. But there again, collaboration helps right.

Kim Campbell: 23:29

And you have to put your ego aside. Sure, absolutely, and I think in that that is a context that many tech writers face, and the important thing there is the collaboration, or even they're called technical authors. In many ways, every tech author or tech writer is an editor, because you're not creating your own content, you're taking the knowledge of other people and what you have gained yourself and somehow crafting whatever it is, the scope of the information you're supposed to create.

Zohra : 24:04

Absolutely, absolutely, kim. That's so very true To your point about proofreaders. I think that is probably more true for print. Even though my book is just an online ebook, I did have a proofreader because if that book were to be printed, then all those beautiful things that you said about what a proofreading process involves should fall in place. So, yeah, in today's world, at least in the tech world, we don't have print. But if you did have pdfs because we still talk about pdfs then probably your editing process would involve that proofreading, just to. It's like a smoke test I think that's what I would call it where you're making sure that the headings are in the right order, the pagination, the orphan lines, all of that Details, the details, exactly.

Kim Campbell: 24:55

And I think one of the things that's important to recognize, and one of the things I try to emphasize with students, is that while perfection is the goal, it's not attainable, and so there is prioritization that has to happen, and this is true in book publishing too.

Kim Campbell: 25:13

You know there's a deadline. Like you can't continue working on the thing forever. At some point it has to go to print or it has to be deployed to a website or to an app or wherever it is that this is going to be delivered. So oftentimes that level of detail of checking, there's not time for that, and so I think oftentimes what happens is things are deployed without all of that checking and then when users notice things, or the next version of the product comes out, but that piece still remains the same, maybe in a copy editor this time around, we'll notice like, oh, there's something we should have fixed, so we can fix it now. With books, obviously, that's much less easy to do because the book is a physical product that doesn't change Website. The great thing about digital right is you can make changes all the time if you want to.

Zohra : 26:14

I'm so glad you talked about prioritization and not chasing after perfection.

Kim Campbell: 26:21

It's very hard for most tech writers, it's very hard.

Zohra : 26:24

It's very hard.

Kim Campbell: 26:26

They want to get that content exactly right. I understand, but it's not realistic. No, because it's not the most important thing for the product. Exactly the commas are not probably going to make a difference in whether the user gets what they need. The right content, however, is very true, very true.

Zohra : 26:50

I want to celebrate that because I've had this little personal motto of mine where I in my head I tell myself perfection is a fool's goal, where I'm being foolish by trying to chase perfection because I'm not doing anything for the audience. Is the audience Exactly Right? Is the audience going to gain anything? If I made sure that my sentence had an Oxford comma, then I'm giving feedback more so because we have peer reviews. But I really think perfection should follow priority. Yes, yeah, if you have the time, go after it, but if you don't, please pay attention to priority. What is the priority? Absolutely.

Kim Campbell: 27:30

And so one of the things that's very important, I think, to all tech writers, certainly to editors, is understanding a process for going through content. And so the very first thing that there's not one process, but if you talk to people who have a lot of experience with editing, there's no one who makes a single pass through content and gets it all. That is ridiculous. No one can pay attention to that many things at once, and so every professional I know of makes many passes through the content, and clearly the first passes need to be the things that are prioritized, and you can't do anything if you don't understand the gist of the whole piece of content. So that has to be the thing you do first, and you're going to have to come back to that again, even if you don't have time at the end to do the Oxford comma right, but you're going to break the process down. Super important for newbies, I think, to understand that no one it's not just them, no one can pay attention to that many things at once, and so what would be most common, I think, among experts would be start with the overall content. You got to make sure you understand what's there, if that's what should be there, what order it comes in. Then you can move on to maybe stylistic things that are related to your style guide making sure you use the right terms, making sure that if you are supposed to have a certain brand voice, if you're supposed to be friendly, make sure it sounds friendly. You got a bunch of second person pronouns in there.

Kim Campbell: 29:08

When you're talking to the user, whatever it happens to be, and then, if you have time, do another pass in which you worry about mechanics or design or you know, if you're responsible for design and that's not a separate thing, that's happening and that's not a separate thing, that's happening. And then always come back to read for gist, again read to make sure that what's in there is what the user is gonna need. So multiple passes is very and again we're talking about the value of linguistic knowledge is your ability to focus on one piece of language at a time or one category of language at a time? So don't think about subject-verb agreement at the same time. You're thinking about jargon. Right, think about jargon first, because that's going to be the most important for the user, I think.

Zohra : 30:04

Yeah, great points there, kim. Important for the user, I think. Yeah, great points there, kim. I think it sort of dovetails into my question, where it dovetails in beautifully. I was thinking, when we think about this process, there can be a lot of angst, there can be a lot of ego coming into play, and we've touched upon some tactical things that we can do. One is several passes. What are the editors thinking of? How do the writers approach this process? Xyz? I think, maybe touching upon this a little bit more, how do we reconcile a situation where, let's say, the author and the editor are butting heads? Sometimes there is nobody to arbitrate for you. You and the editor, the author and the editor have to figure this out and I would love for you to give some suggestions on how one should approach it, both authors and technical editors.

Kim Campbell: 30:59

I think there are several things that you need to do, but the first is there needs to be a standard. You need to do, but the first is there needs to be a standard. There needs to be a style guide, not that people are looking things up, but so that you can say this is how we do things. However, when you say this is how we do things, you have to be polite. I think editors sometimes are so focused on the text that they don't think this is a conversation with someone. This is not a markup. You're not proofreading. You're providing comments to people and so if you change a term that they've used or you've shortened a sentence that someone else has used, you say I've shortened this to implement what it says in our style guide about X. Maybe that's all you need to say. I mean, you don't want to say it for everything you change, but if you anticipate that this is something that's not going to go over well with this particular reviewer, then you should think of that in advance and you should provide an explanation. And the key really is not only having enough knowledge to give the explanation, but also to give the oh, what do we call it? The payoff statement. Yeah, it's one thing to say this is the rule, but it's something else to say why do we follow that rule? So if we make this change, what matters most the users are more likely to get the information quickly, or the users are more likely to feel happy with our company or the users, whatever the change, is the payoff statement being polite about the explanation, having a standard being polite and giving a payoff statement for why that change matters. Those are the things that matter most.

Kim Campbell: 32:56

You know, some people are just curmudgeonly. Some people don't want to change their mind. They want to go back to whatever their fourth grade English teacher told them about how something is done, want to go back to whatever their fourth grade English teacher told them about how something is done. You may not be able to change their mind, but you can still give them the standard that applies. It's always a good idea too, I think, for anybody who's going to have to deal with outsiders who think they know correct.

Kim Campbell: 33:23

I want to say mechanics mostly, you know, like word choice and punctuation and those kinds of things. It's important that not only do you have a style guide that talks about your brand, but also incorporate in that style guide what the arbiter of good taste will be. So is it going to be the Chicago Manual of Style. Is it going to be the Microsoft Writing Style Guide? What is it going to be? Because those places you'll also be able to note, as CMS says, blah, blah, blah. So for those people who are most resistant to changing either their words or you know whosever words they are, those tools go a long way, saying that you have a standard.

Zohra : 34:10

Yeah, I think I agree with you. So this, I think, kind of brings up a thought in my head. There is this there have been situations in my career where I've had different experiences, but the more mature an organization is with its processes, the less of this conflict that I have faced. Or it's not that it removes, it eliminates conflict? No, it may not. We are two people. When two people work together, there's always a chance for conflict. But how that conflict can be resolved becomes easier with everything that you said.

Kim Campbell: 34:44

Absolutely true.

Zohra : 34:45

Being polite, of course, but a process enables politeness and when you have standards, it empowers both parties the editor and the writer to kind of find that common ground. So if an organization does not have a style guide, use what's available to you so that you agree, and of course there has to be an agreement. It shouldn't be that both parties believe that this is not. It has to be codified that this is what we are going to be using to settle our differences and the reason that you're doing that is so you can be consistent across the organization.

Kim Campbell: 35:24

That's all about meeting your audience's needs, your customers' needs I just think most of and it's also true that tech writers, even if like so, they may know what the right standard is.

Kim Campbell: 35:36

If they've got somebody, a reviewer, who digs their heels in and doesn't want to listen to their justification and reasons, then what the editor needs to do is think about how important is this in the scheme of things? So if it's an Oxford comma and they misunderstand what an Oxford, you know, whatever I'm thinking most of the time, if they have some power in this situation, then just give up. This is not that important. However, if it is something that's very, very important, that's when you have to involve somebody else, like the product manager. Yes, yes, you know, if you've got somebody who truly is being an obstacle to meeting the user goals that are the basis of whatever your practice is, whatever your standards are, then that's the time you've got to have a conversation, or with your team leader, or whatever the chain of command is. That's the time, but you aren't going to do it for something that doesn't matter that much to meeting the needs of your audience.

Zohra : 36:43

Yeah, that kind of ties a nice bow to this conversation about being open-minded, having a standard, and if it does get to a point where you need somebody to step in, then you follow the chain of command and hopefully you find a way out. I've been fortunate where I've not run into this issue, because I think what you said be okay with letting go right. You have to pick your battles. Sometimes it does become a battle.

Kim Campbell: 37:10

It is okay to disengage. Exactly.

Zohra : 37:14

Disengage and because, at the end, if you are spinning your wheels trying to get this content out and it's really stalling you, what are you gaining by engaging in this conversation? Challenge, conflict, whatever you want to call it. So letting go is equally important, and keeping your audience in mind Is it going to matter to them, provided the content is of quality and it conveys what it needs to convey. You can always revisit, because this content is not static, and if it is static, then you have a bigger problem. On your hand, you want to make sure that you're revisiting content, you're updating that. That should be part of your content strategy. But moving on, kim, we need to get you to the pool faster.

Kim Campbell: 37:54

Thank you, I appreciate that.

Zohra : 37:56

Yes, that's fine. That's my objective. We've covered some great ground here. We've talked about AI. Right, we don't have technical editors, that's just how it is. But we talked about how do authors themselves hone those skills, develop those skills? In your opinion, how should one approach it If we don't have that, especially for our beginners? I want to open this conversation for them. This is more for them. I think the more seasoned writers have figured out what it will look like. But for my beginner audiences, what would you recommend?

Kim Campbell: 38:35

So maybe the biggest thing is to realize that you're not going to achieve perfection. You know, if you're new, I think that that's well. It's very hard period. If you care about language. You want it to be the best it can be.

Kim Campbell: 38:48

But, as we've said many times now, ultimately it's the needs of your customers and your users, the critical piece, critical piece, and so if they can begin to understand that that is the most important thing, then they can begin to prioritize a little bit what matters more. They can also, usually when there's no role that's a tech editor. It means there's peer reviews. So I think that both giving and receiving feedback is something that people develop over time the ability to do this. But it's not school, is not always a great place to learn this particular skill, because feedback usually comes from a teacher and that's just a whole different relationship than you're going to have with your peers on a team in a tech pubs organization or group. So, learning how to give feedback and we've talked a little bit about that already when we talked about making edits right. So when you're reviewing someone else's work, what you want to do is be polite, you want to provide a justification for changes and you want to provide a payoff statement, especially for the changes that are bigger or that seem like they might encroach a little more on the original author's work. On the flip side, in terms of getting feedback, again, I think the key has to be you don't own this content. Yes, you put it together, but this content is blackbauds or whoever. Whoever you work for, it's their content and your job is to make sure it's the best content it can be. So you have to.

Kim Campbell: 40:34

I think it's important for writers to be able to remove their personal ego from both from editing and from authoring. You have to be able to see, I don't know everything. People have different opinions, but this person who gave me feedback tells me this is part of the standard in our style guide. Well then, I have nothing. I mean, I just need to accept that's it, that's the way it is. I have nothing. I mean, I just need to accept that's it, that's the way it is.

Kim Campbell: 41:01

And eventually, I think most people become able to see that the group does better than the individual, and so they're grateful Like, oh, I'm so glad you caught that. Well, I totally missed it, I totally forgot. And of course, that's true of everyone. It's why, as an individual editor. You have to make multiple passes when you're copy editing because you can't pay attention to everything. Everybody needs an editor, everybody. I don't care how skilled you are, you're not going to see everything and, in fact, even with multiple editors, you're not going to find everything. There's going to be imperfections, and so I just think it helps to have other people around you when you're a newbie that help you figure out this sort of attitude you have to adopt in order to survive in a corporate environment.

Zohra : 41:50

I think the older I get and the more I put into my professional life, the more I invest in it I've become used to. I'm so glad you caught it and I'm so grateful for that because I could have group. That group is your asset. Leverage it Right.

Kim Campbell: 42:09

Yeah, absolutely, and it's that mindset. Switch from I own my content. I write, I am an individual player, an individual creator, like that's not your job role. And they feel defeated when they are in a situation where they're made to feel bad about this.

Zohra : 42:50

And I want to reach out to them and tell them that it is a collective effort. So please don't take it personally. It's not about you, it's the process. So please don't take it personally. It's not about you, it's the process. You have an opportunity here to introduce a process, a different mindset, and follow the guidance that, kim, you have offered, and to come up with standards and also to yes. That mindset takes a bit of time, maybe a few years into your career and it will click. But not to take yes, if you've got all the right feedback and you're still sticking with your ways, then I'm not saying don't take the blame. Take the blame for the right reasons and don't take the blame for the right reasons as well.

Kim Campbell: 43:28

Absolutely true.

Zohra : 43:30

Yeah, but I've mentored students and technical writers who are starting off their careers, where they've been made to feel responsible or they've been made guilty made to feel guilty about this and I feel we have to bridge that divide and create empathy.

Kim Campbell: 43:46

It's a I believe. Anyway, it's a direct consequence of the culture of that organization. And so if there's not somebody who's really the leader of the content whatever the tech pubs area if somebody is not leading there, that's when these kinds of things happen. I'm not saying they don't have a manager. They may have a manager, but if they're not functioning as a leader of a team, that's when it happens.

Kim Campbell: 44:13

And what I tell young people is start looking for a new job, because their culture is not likely to change, but learn everything you can about this particular. You know what I mean. What you're doing in these tasks. Partly what this is going to do is it's going to help you figure out what questions I should be asking when I interview at the next place. Very true, right, I mean. So I want to know what standards, what is your style guide? What is your process? How do you determine what's publishable? You ask all these questions and truly, the way they answer is going to tell you how mature they are as an organization, and most writers don't want to work in an immature organization.

Zohra : 44:58

Great advice there and when you're being interviewed, asking these questions. So this episode is not just about hey, what do you do for technical editing? But then how do you grow in your career? Right, absolutely. That's also part of your strategy, so this has to be part of your long term goal. You want to be interviewed, but you're also interviewing the next place that you want to be in because you you want to be interviewed, but you're also interviewing the next place that you want to be in because you want to professionally develop yourself. Right, you're not working to get the next job. You're constantly evolving, so keep that in the back and center of your mind. It's about you.

Zohra : 45:28

It's about your development as a professional, as a professional and you don't want to stall yourself because this is going to actually defeat you in a way. If you, if you don't think, long term.

Kim Campbell: 45:39

So if you're in that, environment.

Zohra : 45:41

You want to think about what you can do to change the process right.

Kim Campbell: 45:45

Be the agent, change agent if you can if you cannot then follow the advice that kim gave yes, move on yes, learn, ask questions, move on.

Zohra : 45:54

Yeah, and hopefully you know we learn.

Kim Campbell: 45:56

Be better, I mean it will be better whatever, it will be better because you'll know what to look for, absolutely and honestly. That's what will make you a leader. It doesn't take that long before you can be the one, like you're saying, who can be the change agent. So when they're hiring you and you're asking, you know what are your challenges. Part of what you should be talking about is well, here are some ways I might think about handling those challenges and more than likely, you're going to end up, even if you're in a fairly entry-level position, you're going to end up being more of a leader, even if it's a leader of three. You know what I mean. So it's you and a couple of other writers and you're helping each other. If it's the right kind of company, they're going to want you helping figure out how do we make decisions here? What process should we use?

Zohra : 46:49

Yeah, and this is also all part of our, I think, part of the growth mindset, where if an organization does not embrace that value, it definitely is not a good fit for me. I know that by this time.

Kim Campbell: 47:03

I get exactly what you're saying, because I do know some tech writers who work in what I would call a pretty immature tech pubs environment, but they seem very happy, so everybody can find their niche.

Zohra : 47:16

Yes, yes, absolutely. And you, self-awareness is, uh, equally important there, I think, kim. One last question. I thought I was done, but I'm like, hey, I have to ask you this question and I'm just going to read it out to you. Hopefully it'll make sense. Okay, with artificial intelligence, especially generative artificial gen ai, there is a lot of chatter about how human oversight of ai generated content is going to become a priority, has become a priority in the short one and a half years that we've had Gen AI around us. What is the impact or pivot in editing for AI, in your opinion?

Kim Campbell: 47:49

This is such a fast whatever quickly evolving situation that it's hard to give an answer. So I'm going to do two things. I'll give you two kinds of answers. One is simpler than the other.

Kim Campbell: 48:05

So, in terms of tools, I think it's really important that tech authors recognize that we've been using advanced tools for a very long time. That part of AI is not new. So this natural language programming stuff is behind the stuff you can do in Word with styles and creating table of contents, or advanced autocorrect or advanced find and replace or creating macros, or you know, even in a simple tool like or simple program like Word, we've always taken advantage of whatever tools help us be more effective, more efficient, and that's true of the newer tool, right? So if you're an organization that has enough tech pub budget, if content is important enough, especially if you're translating a bunch and you're lucky enough to use something like Congre or Acrolinx, those things are based on natural language programming. They've been around since early 2000. So those tools are more about dealing with drafts. So what's different about the AI that we've been introduced to in the last couple of years is that it's generative. So it's not only catching things in a draft you've created, but it's generating its own content based on could be relatively limited information that you've given it. So the second part of the answer is about what do we do with the generative AI and how is that different for editors? And I don't think it's different in the sense of, of course, reviewing, for accuracy is important, but it always has been. You don't publish your content without a SME saying, yeah, that's how the thing works, so it's not really different. I mean, so the AI content goes to the SME and the SME says that's not right and you change it. So I don't think accuracy, I don't think that's different. It's just you know how much do you trust the generative AI system you're using, and that in itself is so. There's levels here.

Kim Campbell: 50:21

One of the things that editors can do on their own, without a whole lot of organizational support, is become better prompt writers. So you know, when we were talking earlier about you're going to have the AI create a first draft of whatever a topic file for a task that a user can do in your product. Well, make sure that you give the AI a whole bunch of information so it isn't just give me this or here are the specs, write the task it's. Here are the specs. Here are the standards we use. You know what I mean. Here's a task that's really bad. You're going to give it a whole bunch of information before you say build me the topic, generate it. Left on its own, it's going to do a pretty crappy job. I mean, maybe it won't be worse than what your most junior, least talented tech writer will do. Maybe not, but it's still not going to be good enough.

Kim Campbell: 51:28

So part of it is about prompting. The reason it's about prompting is because these large language models that we've been exposed to, whether they come from OpenAI or they come from Anthropic or Meta or whoever they come from basically they made available to us a computer system in which we have to use the C prompt in order to interact with it. So this is like going back many, many, many years when it used to be that if I wanted to open a program I had to go to the Windows operating system and type in the C prompt. You know what I mean Open, point, dot, exe, whatever, in order. Just you know. Now we just click a button or we say open. It didn't used to work like that. So we've come a long way with the interface. I guess is what I'm trying to say between the operating system and whatever we're trying to use it to do in our professional or personal life. The LLMs are not currently. They're like the C prompt you have to build everything in to tell it what to do. Eventually, organizations are going to develop interfaces between, and they'll do that by using a version of the AI that they control. That's not you know. The content doesn't go out to everybody else. It's only housed on their own systems and they'll provide a whole bunch of content in that system, in the LLM. That's internal to the company that trains it.

Kim Campbell: 53:02

My one message to tech writers is damn it, you should be involved in training those systems. If they're doing that at your company, and if your company's large enough, they're doing it, trust me, make sure you get yourself a seat at the table Somebody talk to whoever you can at your company and make sure that they understand how tech pubs is like the center. It's the center of all the content that they want to be able to automatically generate. So you need to be involved in giving it examples and saying here's the list of standards and here's how you apply them, and going back to what they did when they trained the original excuse me, the original LLMs. They had people like don't misunderstand, yes, the computer's doing a lot, but they used human beings to train this, to say that's a good response, that's not a good response. Well, we still need humans involved in helping the AI figure out what's a good response and what's not. So I realize that's a really long answer too, but I hope that that gives you some little insight.

Zohra : 54:14

You did a lot of things as you were kind of writing this story. One is of nostalgia because I missed the C prompt. There was something simple about it and it did give you more control.

Kim Campbell: 54:26

Absolutely.

Zohra : 54:27

And those were simpler days. So well that dates me.

Kim Campbell: 54:30

That's okay and in some ways that is how we're interacting with the large language models. Now it's pretty like it's really we have control over what's out. The problem is, our control means we have to put in effort yeah, just give it yeah, and I almost feel like very soon we will.

Zohra : 54:48

We will be looking back at this time where we have this control and access to the llms, without all these interfaces, and think back on oh, those were the good days. I almost have this feeling of deja vu from the future.

Zohra : 55:03

And then the second thing was it was a great analogy to kind of reset our thinking how do you approach it, getting your seat at the table? And the third thing, I think what I felt my takeaway was as much as things change, they seem to remain the same. It's like my career goes right the trajectory when I look at it. I started and I thought, ooh, things are changing, constantly evolving, and I hit this plateau, sort of, and now I'm going back, I'm resetting and rethinking on oh, I need to draw on my skills that I have built up over a lifetime.

Kim Campbell: 55:40

Absolutely true, and I think those skills that you're building on are your human understanding of how things work, and so it's your ability to be the structural or the developmental editor. That's what creates good prompts in the AI. There is no AI that really understand well. They don't understand anything, they're not animate, they're not you know what. I mean there's a reason AI could. It's artificial intelligence, not actual. It may look intelligent, but it's only as intelligent as what we put in.

Zohra : 56:18

To your point, they're not sentient and they're not actual quote unquote, which is so very true, and I think my biggest takeaway is human oversight. That remains the cornerstone of this particular conversation, and anything else.

Kim Campbell: 56:33

Don't undervalue yourself, you hold the key to that creativity self, you hold the key to that creativity. I've been telling our students for 20 years now that becoming a copy editor is not a good career move, and it's because, for 20 years at least, much of copy editing can be automated in something as simple as Word. So that skill of copy editing is not really that valuable. But structural or developmental editing absolutely is. And being able to put it all together and think about the user right, it's understanding all those levels of edit and having a process. That means that you're going to develop content for a user that's most likely to meet their needs. But if you just want to copy, edit or just proofread, you've really limited your possibility for employment.

Zohra : 57:29

And on that note, Kim, I'm going to let you go so that you can enjoy that splash Great conversation. Thank you so much for your time on a Saturday morning to come on my show and give us these great nuggets.

Kim Campbell: 57:43

I appreciate it I appreciate being as or I'll always enjoy chatting with you it's a pleasure.

Zohra : 57:51

Have a great weekend. Bye, everybody. Subscribe to the podcast on your favorite app, such as Apple, Spotify or YouTube Music. For the latest on my show, follow me on LinkedIn or visit me at wwwinsidetechcomshow. Catch you soon on another episode.