dragonfly editorial

I was helping a colleague edit a document on U.S. Navy policies this week, and talking with her about which style guide we should follow — GPO, Chicago, or AP.

Then, lo, a brief online search revealed . . .  the U.S. Navy Style Guide! Who’d a thunk it?

Interestingly, the guide advises readers to use the AP Stylebook rather than GPO as a secondary reference. We tried this, but found that many Navy-specific terms, such as shipbuilder or linecrew, weren’t address in AP but were in GPO.

Thus, our style took a winding road: we looked first at the U.S. Navy Guide for style guidance, then at AP, and then at GPO.

Somehow it all worked out. Because ultimately, which style you choose is less important than making sure that a style — any style — is implemented consistently across your  document. And that’s what we did.

Project manager Amy writes to say that she found a unique spellout for “FTP” today in a technical document we were editing: “Filet Transfer Protocol.” (For those of you who don’t know, FTP actually stands for File Transfer Protocol, and refers to the transfer of data from one computer to another.)

Great catch, Amy! Just another example of helping our clients look like superstars instead of dorks.

I had the pleasure of interviewing photographer Rick Pearson earlier this year for the Dayton Creative Syndicate. Rick’s profile is up on the DCS website — read the whole thing here.

For those who don’t know, DCS offers networking and continuing education for creative professionals, some of it process-oriented, some of it highly technical. Rick’s profile is part of DCS’s Creative Crux, an ongoing series profiling local creative companies and individuals.

Rick is a great photographer and a genuinely nice guy — a perfect combo. He’s going to be presenting to DCS later in August or September — setting up a mock photo shoot and walking us through how he puts a shoot together. The date is TBD, so check the DCS calendar to see when it’s scheduled.

In the meantime, here are a couple excerpts from Rick’s interview.

SE: So, are you a photographer who got into video, or a video guy who got into photography?

RP: Actually, neither! Originally, I was a performance art student, but I kept noticing the camera work being done on the student films around me — what shooters were doing with the camera, how they were choosing to move it, and how they were augmenting the actors’ performances. It got to the point that when I was rehearsing, my mind would begin working out coverage as if I were going to shoot the scene in my head. I guess that’s when I knew that motion photography was for me.

SE: What’s the relationship between still and motion photography? Does what you know about one play into how you approach the other?

RP: Many aspects of the mediums transfer to one another, but each is distinct. With still photography, you are capturing a single frame – that that allows you to get every detail exactly as you want it, an opportunity you don’t generally have with video. On the flip side, I think it’s far easier to tell a story using motion photography. And you still have pretty precise control over the actions, lighting, colors, and composition.

Read the whole interview here.

We edited 1,160 pages last week, Monday through Sunday. I think that’s an all-time Dragonfly high.

The work was spread across four clients. One needed just 10 pages edited; another, 830. Many of the projects came in unexpectedly and required same-day or next-day turnaround. Other projects had schedules and deadlines that fluctuated constantly, requiring us to flex our staff and our schedules to match.

How did we do it?

• Use dedicated project managers. Each client worked with a dedicated project manager who took in the documents, assigned them to our various editors, funneled them through desktop publishing (if needed), and returned them to the client. The project managers carefully tracked where each document was at any given time — so nothing got lost, and no deadlines were missed.
• Use editorial leads. For these efforts, the project managers also acted as editorial leads, fielding style questions from the editors, communicating requests from the client, and quality-checking all the work performed.
• Use experienced editors. The editors handling these four projects — which included proposals, medical journals, and marketing copy — all had extensive experience with these particular types of projects. They also had experience working with the clients involved, and knew their editorial style and preferences. Experienced editors can dig into even difficult copy without any learning curve — and produce quality results, time after time.
• Use standard processes. All of our editors follow a standard procedures sheet that guides them through the steps in the editing process, and all follow a specific style guide for each of our clients. Using standard processes eliminates questions and uncertainty when starting a job — and produces a cleaner end product, saving time in the quality-checking rounds.
• Staff around the clock. OK, we didn’t staff completely around the clock. But we had editors and project managers working on staggered shifts from 8:00 a.m. to midnight Monday through Friday, and from 8 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Using staggered shifts allows us to be much more responsive to our clients’ needs; authors can write until 4:00 p.m., for example, and have us edit between 5:00 and 10:00 p.m. It also allows us to accommodate our editors’ needs; staff with work commitments or child care duties during the day can come on call at 6:00 p.m. and give us 5 or 6 hours of quiet editing time in the evening.

The real secret to getting this amount of work done in a week, however, is our amazing Dragonfly editors and project managers. These great people are consistently willing to throw themselves into projects with challenging deadlines and “get ‘er done,” no matter what it takes. Once they commit to a project, they’re in it for the long haul. I appreciate their commitment, their attention to detail, and their good humor tremendously.

Maybe I’m just getting sappy because I’m pregnant and at 39.5 weeks. But my clients are just constantly reminding me this week how awesome they are.

I’ve been trying to finish writing a case study for a client here in Dayton, and having a tough time getting through to their end customer to set up an interview. I wrote to my client this afternoon, telling him that my due date is next week and that I was worried I may not be able to finish the piece.

Here’s his response:

Don’t stress yourself over it. Your child is far more important. It can wait if it needs to. You can send me what you have and I’ll work with it and fill if the blanks if needed.

Thank you, dear client. That’s the kindest response I’ve ever gotten to telling someone that a deadline was in jeopardy. I promise I’ll kick butt for you after I’m back from my maternity leave!