There’s no one right way to run your business, only the way that works for you at any given moment. It’s all trial and error. Efficiency isn’t about what you do so much as doing it the same way every time.

One of the most effective quality-control and disaster-prevention tools ever developed is also one of the simplest: the checklist. Surgeons use checklists. Astronauts use checklists. Stage managers use checklists. And editors use checklists.

The first thing you need for truly great corporate documents is a truly great style guide. Knowing it all off the top of your head is not good enough. You’re not the only person handling the text and you may leave the company someday. More importantly, no human can ever be one hundred percent consistent.

Independent editors play a crucial role across nearly every industry. However, if you run your own editing business then you know how difficult it can be to find time to market your services. That’s why we’ve put together this guide to help you demonstrate and market your value.

So much of life is about who’s in your set. Word’s wildcards are really no different. Most of us have a ‘crowd’ that we feel some sort of affinity with. Professional groups, special interests; type of food or music we like; and so on.

You’re in a management or leadership role, so you have to review draft documents. The question is: Do you micromanage your review? You’re a good manager, so you don’t micromanage other tasks.

If you work with medical text, you’re familiar with how authors like to salt their text with SLTs (Simple Lexical Tools) representing SLTs (Standard Learned Terms). Sometimes, however, these are SLT (Single, Limited, or Transient) in use, and much of the time their real function is just as SLTs (Shiny Little Toys).

There are five important things to watch for in numbered and bulleted lists. If you’re editing according to a style manual such as The Chicago Manual of Style, you’ll have good guidance for many of these things. But even if your style is entirely at your discretion, you’ll still want to think before you list.

It’s important to get a PLS right. When done well, these summaries can improve health literacy in the general public and encourage the pharmaceutical companies that sponsor clinical research to operate more transparently. These eight hacks, adapted from tips by the Plain Language Association International and The Center for Plain Language, will help you master your next PLS.

Here are some ideas for what to do about 42 of the most hated buzzwords.

Before you schedule an interview with your SME, you’ll want to do a bit of homework first. Plopping down in front of them and saying “tell me everything you know” will waste both of your time—and likely won’t get you the focused content you need. Instead, take an organized approach to working with an SME. Here are six steps to guide you through the process.

Knowing your audience is critical in technical writing. If your content isn’t catered to the right audience, your readers may be turned off by your copy. They may not understand the critical information you’re trying to convey. And if you have to rewrite your copy? That’s a waste of time, resources, and effort. So how do you tailor content to specific audiences? Here’s a three-step process for learning about your audience and producing content specific to their needs.

The importance of good writing in technical grant proposals is significantly underestimated. Have a thought for the grant review committees. Reviewing 40 or 50 grant applications for three or four funding opportunities is depressing enough, but when they are written by scientists, engineers and tech people with few writing skills, it can be agony. Are you surprised that grant proposal reviewers respond better to well-written proposals?

Military writing is not just instruction manuals. It includes official correspondence, reports, academic writing projects, contracts, blog posts, press articles and many other genres. The U.S. Army alone lists over forty kinds of official army publications. As technical writers, we can learn a great deal from military style rules. But we also need to understand when and how to deviate from them, to have the right effect.

Technical writing can be a challenge. Often, you’re exploring a new topic—say, overhead cranes that are used to move heavy items around factory floors.

With 193 member states, the United Nations could probably have 193 different style guides. Fortunately, the organization has settled on just one United Nations Editorial Manual. The comprehensive online guide includes style suggestions for everything from acronyms to numbering of maps and figures.

If you’re a technical writer, you’re used to handling tricky topics. Maybe you’re teaching system administrators how to set up a new IT platform. Or writing instructions for forklift operators. Or describing how to assemble a gas grill in a way that won’t cause married couples to immediately file for divorce.

One event of 2020 that might have passed you by: using two spaces after a period is now officially a formatting error. At least, according to Microsoft. The extra space is now marked with a blue squiggly line. This may not have been the biggest news this year. However, it’s a joyful win in a long, painful battle between the die-hard double-spacers, relics from the time of typewriters and fixed-width fonts, and typographers, and their supporters, who feel passionately that the additional space is an insult to modern font designers.

Editing has several “golden rules”—plus quite a lot of silver and bronze ones, too—but high on the list is the classic Golden Rule we were taught as children: Treat others as you would have them treat you. What this means, among other things, is take care not to use language that treats some people as intrinsically inferior. Use sensitive language: as inclusive, conscious, and unbiased as possible.

Your anguished cry rings out in the middle of the night: “Why, oh why, did I accept this stupid freelance job?” You know the answer: The client offered you twice as much money as you’d ordinarily get for a job like this because the deadline is tight. But now that deadline is looming, and there’s still a lot of work ahead. If only you knew how to use wildcard find and replace!