For professional editors, climbing to the top of the field and staying there is challenging. You need to be consistently good at your job so that your clients will come back to you again and again, and will refer others to you.

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 COVID-19 pandemic has shined a spotlight on the World Health Organization (WHO), an intergovernmental organization that works worldwide to promote health, keep the world safe, and serve the vulnerable. As part of their work, WHO publishes a range of documents, from international health standards, to “situation reports” describing progress in fighting a disease, to advice for the public on staying safe and healthy.

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?

Spellcheck is one of the most basic checks that editors and writers run on their documents. But those same editors and writers will tell you that spellcheck doesn’t always know what to do with complex or unusual terms like drug names.

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.

The GPO Style Manual, last updated in 2016, is the official guide to the form and style of the U.S. Government Publishing Office. The electronic version is free to download. Although designed for use in Federal Government printing and publishing, the GPO Style Manual is relied upon by writers and editors both within and outside the Federal Government.

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.

Bidding for large EU contracts may seem challenging. However, the process is easier than you think. Moreover, the focus on transparency can work to your advantage. Here’s what you need to understand. EU procurement laws state that contracts over certain values must be advertised through the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) to select the most economically advantageous bidder to deliver the contract.

The Microsoft Writing Style Guide is the go-to style for information technology (IT)–specific communications. The IT audience is large and varied, ranging from help desk staff to chief technology officers. The people that make up that audience come from all over the world and speak many different languages.

Drug manufacturing is a capitalist business. We know this because, pretty much without exception, drug manufacturers handle their brand names in ALL CAPITALS: “The gold standard in maintenance treatment for reticulated spline is KYDATID® (roftlomulast).” But does that mean you have to handle it that way too?

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.

The names that we give to drugs share some important features: they’re long, difficult to spell, not recognized by spell checkers, and kind of weird. So if you work in medical writing or editing, how can you handle them without melting your brain?

In the Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word, you’ll learn how to build your own wildcard searches with detailed screenshots and instructions. You will gain the confidence you need to implement these time-saving strategies in your work. And if you love the idea of wildcards but are not ready to write your own, the Wildcard Cookbook includes real-world examples that you can simply copy and paste!

Are you getting the most you can from Microsoft Word? Wildcard search is one of the most powerful features in Word. You can use it to quickly find errors and make changes throughout a document in a matter of seconds. In this article, learn how to use Word wildcards to help fix a tricky citation issue.

Are you getting the most you can from Microsoft Word? Wildcard search is one of the most powerful features in Word. You can use it to quickly find errors and make changes throughout a document in a matter of seconds. In this article, we explore real-life challenges fixed by Word wildcards.

Are you getting the most you can from Microsoft Word? Wildcard search is one of the most powerful features in Word. You can use it to quickly find errors and make changes throughout a document in a matter of seconds. In this article, you'll learn how to use “@” and “?” in your word wildcard searches.