Editors: Brush up on your skills

Our guide to the selfless task of making everyone else look good Editing is a lost art among corporate communicators or, at best, a luxury few can afford. Most corporate writers are deprived of true editors, although there seems to be no shortage of managers to review their copy and approvers to make it worse. But they rarely have editors who are there to simply make their writing better, to make them better.

And those who are lucky enough to actually command a staff of reporters seldom have time to do anything but rewrite the stories handed to them. But editors provide an important function, whether they’re riding herd over a team of professional writers and freelancers, reworking the efforts of volunteer scribes or simply editing themselves. Being an editor means so much more than pulling out the red pen and slashing away, or starting at the top of the computer screen and reworking every sentence until you’ve created something entirely new. Editors are responsible for a multitude of tasks. Among them: