Higher Editing: Educate your content contributors

Getting tired of making the same editing corrections to the same colleague's work, over and over and over again? There is hope.

Yes, in the short run, it's easier to just fix things yourself or write a quick proofreading mark. But those microchanges add up over time, and constantly bleeding red ink over others' work won't exactly help your relationship for the long term. Address the core problems — not just the symptoms — to improve the work product and efficiency of your team:

• Explain why you make your changes. Either through a written mark-up, email message or in person, it helps to coach content contributors on the reasons why you correct their work can help prevent them from making the same mistake in the future.
• Build your institutional style guide. Setting ground rules for common style issues, such as campus abbreviations, titles and locations, is an important place to start building consistency and consensus among your institution's writers and editors. If you don't already have a style guide, start one. Members of the University and College Designers Association can access an index of style guides from around the country on their website, or a quick web search will yield dozens of examples.
• Share resources. Read any great newsletter articles or blog posts lately on the issue at hand? Know of a helpful grammar or design resource? Forward these resources on to those peers who might benefit from them. Ragan Communications offers one of my favorite daily e-newsletters on all things PR, and many of their featured infographics are pinned to my office bulletin board. Feel free to add your recommendations to the comments section below.
  

Higher Editing: Eliminate these common errors

Have you hugged your editor today? If not, you can at least make sure you're avoiding the following common errors in your higher education prose:

• Incorrect use of "alumni." If you don't want to accidentally change the gender of an honored graduate, please commit the following list to memory:

• More than one graduate, including at least one male: ALUMNI
• More than one graduate, all female: ALUMNAE
• One male graduate: ALUMNUS
• One female graduate: ALUMNA
• There's no such thing as an "ALUM" unless you're talking about chemistry (the subject itself, not your academic department)

• Hosting a "first annual" event. There's no such thing. There are "first" or "inaugural" events, both of which imply that there will be subsequent events. However, you can't have an "annual" event until it is held two consecutive years.

• "Univeristy." This is one that spell-check should catch every time, but it still gets by on occasion.
  

• "Graduating a school." This isn't my personal pet peeve, but it is one brought up by legal writing guru Bryan Garner during his commencement speech last year. Correct usage: graduating from a school.
  

Top three myths that you don't know will kill your blog

I love to read blogs that offer practical tips, scan-able lists, and quick advice, and I enjoy writing in a similar style. But there can be too much of a good thing. Inspired by a brief Twitter exchange with @mStonerBlog and @andrewcareaga, I thought I'd share my own top-three list of tired blog memes:

• Things you don't know, have missed, and aren't going to find anywhere else. In this world of information overload, no one wants to miss out on a big story amidst all of the noise.
  
• Things you think you know, but what you know is wrong. Have you been misled by myths? Thankfully, there are blog posts that will clear up the confusion!
  
• Concepts that will kill other concepts, kick other concept's tail, or are dead. Email, Facebook and Google social media projects may seem like living organisms. They might seem threatening at times, or even look like they're being threatened. But they don't have a pulse. They do not have weapons or a physical presence. They cannot fight, receive medical treatment, or be thrown in jail for their transgressions.

P.S. Some might add that top-three (or top five, 10, etc.) lists have also passed their prime. Considering that David Letterman's top-10 list has endured for more than 25 years, I think the theme is immortal.

Graduation collaboration: Sharing the workload on commencement programs

There are few higher education publication projects that are more collaboratively time-intensive than the commencement program. It's a document that will be treasured for decades by graduates and parents alike, and whether your institution is graduating 50 students or 5,000—it had better be accurate.

Of course, reaching perfection can be an elusive goal for any publication, let alone a commencement program. It's a herculean task requiring extensive collaboration from the registrar's office, student affairs, academic deans, faculty award committees, etc. Academic recognitions may not be finalized until weeks before the event, and it's tempting to delay production for the inevitable last-minute changes.

Since our communications office began producing our graduation-related programs two years ago, we've found Adobe InCopy to be an invaluable tool for managing the process. It's a basic word processor that can link directly into an Adobe InDesign document, where the graphic designer can alter the appearance and organization of the layout. Think of it as a content management system for a printed document, instead of a website.

By saving the files to a shared campus file space and separating sections of the program into different linked files, several users in different departments can update the document at once. Once the information has been finalized by the various offices, the communications office finishes the publication and sends it to the printer.

To train other departments on how to use InCopy to update the program, I used TechSmith's free version of its Jing screen-capture video software to narrate the steps for finding the files and editing them in the program. Watch the training video.

Another technical trick for checking accuracy is to save every official name to your InDesign user dictionary. It won't catch every mistake, but running a spell-check to the entire document after this step can catch some elusive name errors.

Photo courtesy of Flickr.com/omgdek under Creative Commons license.

Favorite free online resources for higher ed marketing

Need to hire a photographer in another geographic area? Check out the College/University Editors directory of recommended photographers or another from the University and College Designers Association.

Want to check out other schools' style guides? Check out the UCDA style guide index.

Wondering what your Web site looks like in other browsers? Visit BrowserShots.org or find out which ones you can test or emulate on your own machine at the SiteWizard.com.

Can't keep up with the acronyms that frequent texters or retired military colleagues are using? Go to AcronymFinder.com to see every possibility.

Low-cost creative productivity tool #2: Mind-mapping software

Problem: High volume of disorganized information and thoughts.
Solution: Mind-mapping software.

Once upon a time (18 months ago), our site architecture needed a complete overhaul. Hundreds of links had to be sorted out into new categories, some needed to be deleted, and other pages needed to be researched and created. Papers, charts and lists were spread over my desk.

If only I knew then about mind-mapping software (thanks to a Get-It-Done Guy podcast). By creating an organizational tree with branches and nodes that can be opened and collapsed, moved, color-coded and deleted, it is much easier to visually identify themes and eliminate weak or redundant ideas.

I first tried it out a few months ago when re-organizing our H1N1 site from a chronological series of lengthy e-mail messages to a more sensible resource site with sections on our institution's response, what to do if H1N1 affects you personally, and information on the virus itself from other organizations. Mind-mapping software allowed me to simplify the content and present it in a more complete, user-friendly manner.

Now I'm hooked—there is potential for organizing lengthy articles, presentations, publication design and other creative materials. I use FreeMind, which is available Mac and Windows versions, but there are many of free and low-cost options out there.

Previously in this series: Low-cost creative productivity tool #1: Google Docs

Low-cost creative productivity tool #1: Google Docs

Problem: Collaborative editing and file access.
Solution: Google Docs.
Tired of tracking versions of Word files when working with multiple editors? Hate transferring Office files via jump drive or e-mail so you can access them from another computer? Then it's time to discover cloud computing via Google Docs. Requiring only a free Google account and a working internet browser, users can save and share a variety of file types: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and forms that can be exported into Office (.doc, .xls, .ppt), PDF, RTF, HTML and other formats. Files can be shared with other Google account holders, and version tracking makes this an ideal environment for collaboration. I have also found it to be any extremely handy place to keep my contacts...especially in the rare occasion that work servers are down.