RICKARICE.COM                                                                                                         

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Contact Me Via Email: Rick@RickARice.com

Expertise:

Technical Writing

Technical Editing

Proposal Development

Other Specialties:

        Software User Guide Development

            Procedure Manual Development

        Training Materials Development

            Project Management

        Data Gathering

            Survey Development

        Interviewing

            Literature Review

        Internet Research

            Records Research

        Editorial Development

            Publication Management

        Publication Design

            Marketing Plan Development

        Media Outreach

            Industry Outreach

        Market Development

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For information on my creative writing go to www.RARWRITER.com

 

EDITING

Through my early years of working as a writer, in one capacity or another, I was usually working on staffs where co-existing as an editor just came with the territory. In those situations, I was mostly called upon to use the type of training I got from absorbing Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. It was the basic stuff of grammar, spelling and sentence construction.

As I gained experience and moved away from commercial publications and toward more business oriented documentation, I encountered more sophisticated operations. The Chicago Manual of Style, with all of its detailed technical standards for a range of disciplines, became the "bible" and I became cognizant of a type of editing I had not known before. It was technical editing. This was copy editing plus comprehensive, compliance, consistency, and technical/structural levels of edit. This was all about how information and publication development must be handled to have high professional value when it stretches out over an extended number of pages. This is something, twenty years hence, that I have become quite good at.

Comprehensive editing, in my experience, is done by senior level staff. I have been fortunate to work in positions in which I have had input regarding concept and communication strategies. Those decisions, in the end, belong to the people for whom I work. My role more frequently has been in the trenches doing copy editing, checking for consistency in terms of word usage and voice, and checking the document against its reason for being, usually a Request for Proposal or a contract.

In the last dozen years the functionality of the document has become more important as on line publication has become standard practice. This is all about setting up adequate styles and tagging components of documents properly. Sometimes it is about managing style sheets, too: a real challenge in an environment where a lot of people have access to files. I have done a lot of technical/structural editing, including HTML editing to manage the way web sites and help systems display.

 

On the Pavement

One of the most enjoyable and interesting editing experiences I have had over the years is my ongoing relationship with Dr. Eul-Bum Lee (E.B. Lee) of the University of California’s Pavement Research Center.

E.B. has been a central figure in research related to the Long Life Pavement Rehabilitation Strategies (LLPRS) program. A joint initiative undertaken by the departments of transportation of California, Washington, Texas and Minnesota, the LLPRS program is testing alternative strategies for rapid rehabilitation of deteriorated surfaces on high volume urban freeways. The goal is to replace these surfaces with pavements that will last 40 years with relatively low maintenance.

Under E.B.’s direction, the program has expanded beyond its initial purpose to include research into the implementation of Automated Work Zone Information Systems (AWIS) and use of the Internet to manage the volume of traffic affected by rehabilitation lane closures. Beyond that, E.B. has also been at the leading edge in developing the Construction Analysis for Pavement Rehabilitation Strategies (CA4PRS) construction management software. CA4PRS is used to estimate how much pavement can be rehabilitated or reconstructed under different traffic closure strategies, considering project design and constraints and the number of lanes closed. The software provides a construction schedule baseline for the integrated analysis of pavement design, construction logistics, and traffic operations. It was designed to help state highway agencies and paving contractors develop sounder construction schedules that minimize traffic delay, extend the service life of pavement, and cut agency costs.

E.B. was introduced to me through a friend, the excellent editor Brian Halton, who I worked with at Bechtel and ITSI. E.B. and I struck up a productive relationship focused on technical papers describing his research and journal articles for the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the Transportation Research Board (TRB). Both of these esteemed organizations set a very high standard for articles proposed for publication in their journals, and E.B. and I have more frequently been successful than not in getting his papers published.

E.B.’s work almost automatically qualifies for ASCE and TRB acceptance on the strength of its relevance to the nation's current infrastructure crises. The hurdle is putting it in words acceptable to the juries that review the submitted papers. E.B., who is from Seoul, South Korea is not a native English speaker. He is a highly competent writer, even in his adopted English, and he has extremely exacting standards when it comes to describing the details of his research. On the other hand, the task of developing initial text for parts of his technical papers is assigned to his capable research team of post-graduate students, who are also Korean non-native English speakers and not nearly as experienced with the language as is E.B.

Technical editors view editing assignments in terms of effort, i.e., light, regular, or heavy edit. A light edit is a basic check for grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc., and the Society for Technical Communication (STC) suggests a metric of 15 pages per hour for that level of work. A regular edit is all that plus some rewriting, and the STC metric for that type of work is 6 pages per hour.

The work I have done for E.B. and his group falls into the heavy edit category, which translates into all aspects of editing, including extensive rewrite. The STC metric for that work is 4 pages per hour, but that certainly wouldn’t accommodate the level of work I have done on E.B.’s papers, which typically go through heavy rewrite and a couple review/revision cycles. When these papers are finalized they are really well done and this is why we have been so successful at getting them published.

Beyond journal articles and technical papers, I have also supported E.B. in the development of materials for the CA4PRS software, including a user guide and marketing materials. 

Men in Space Suits

I was fortunate to be selected for work on a Bechtel Department of Defense (DoD) program to design chemical demilitarization facilities for the disposal of aging chemical weapons. I think of this as my “men in space suits” experience because all the many months I worked on the project there sat in a nearby Bechtel conference room what appeared to be a man in a NASA astronaut outfit. It sat there at the head of a conference table, a complete Level 1 Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) ensemble, including helmet with tinted glass. There was no one actually in the suit, but you would never have guessed. Having it sit there while all the work was going on around gave the whole project a sort of Stanley Kubrick surrealism, as if we were working on the set of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

The project was interesting enough in itself, even without the space suit. The Bechtel guys were designing facilities for ridding the world of something that could only do harm, and planning for operations in close proximity to residential communities. They were dealing with containment, mobility and safety redundancy issues, not to mention the spotlight glare of interested parties. From my point of view, the project had the advantage of being rich with chem-demil specific terms, my favorite of which was “leakers and rejects,” for which I have found continued purpose. It refers to canisters of chemical agent that have lost their integrity, but sounds like your uncle Billy and his friends.

Bechtel had assembled a team of 180 design engineers, who were assigned to work space on two floors of the Bechtel offices on Fremont Street in downtown San Francisco, just across a plaza from the company headquarters at 50 Beale.

I and two other editors, Liz Van Houten and Janet Bailey, were provided with a corner office on the 24th floor and we signed For Official Use Only (FOUO) security agreements. It was our job to provide a technical edit of all the materials developed by the design group.

The complexity of the documents made it necessary to develop an air tight document control system, which was brilliantly managed by Ms. Van Houten. We provided what I would describe as regular technical edits, meaning there was some rewrite involved. That mostly fell to me and Ms. Bailey, primarily because neither of us are shy about suggesting alternative word choices. We both have a light touch and can usually work in successful collaboration with technical experts.

A major undertaking was developing and adhering consistently to a glossary for the terms used in the program. Just as importantly, we had to develop a reasonably strong understanding of the full range of practices and procedures involved in the chem-demil process, which included removing canisters from the igloos in which they are stored, transporting them on specially designed vehicles for delivery to the neutralizing sites, cleaning and rinsing operations, and final disposal.

The documents were extremely technical in nature, filled with chemical designations and mathematical formulas.

We had something like 30 volumes of documents to pour through, which we did with extraordinary efficiency. Again, I would credit Liz Van Houten’s management skills with our success in this regard, and give another tip of the hat to Ms. Bailey, who is top drawer. As an editing group, we exceeded the expectations of the project leaders, both in terms speed and quality of work. We helped the design group deliver an excellent product.

 

 

 

 

 

©Rick Alan Rice (RAR), July, 2006

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