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Overview of editing at Ritza

26 March 2025

Editors at Ritza have the sometimes-tricky job of balancing the needs of different audiences.

  • Our readers want clear, useful, and accurate content
  • Our customers want clear, useful, and accurate content, but they also want it to show off their product at its best, and they want it delivered on time and to budget
  • Our writers want to improve their writing skills, and use each article as an opportunity to do so, while also meeting their deadlines on other articles

These goals are normally broadly aligned, but there can be some subtle tensions, and editors at Ritza need to have a deep understanding of these goals and how they interact. Given infinite time we could make an article infinitely good and find an infinite number of learning opportunities for our writers.

Goals of editing

  • The Ritza standard: Ritza has a high quality bar, and editors at Ritza maintain this standard. Everything we publish should be well written, well structured, and not contain any grammatical or other language errors.
  • Writer coaching: Ritza's Engineering Writers are often engineers first and writers second. Editors at Ritza should help our Engineering Writers improve their writing skills.
  • Customer reputation: Ritza's content is a blend of education and marketing. Our writers are often focused more on the 'education' than the 'marketing'. Ritza's editors should ensure that we are sensitive to our customers' reputation and brand, and that we don't publish anything that might embarrass them.
  • Style: Each article we produce might follow one or more style guides (ours, our customers', our customers' partners, etc). Editors at Ritza should ensure consistency at different levels (within an article, within a publication, to one or more style guides), and be pragmatic about making style decisions in cases of uncertainty or conflict.

Kinds of editing

  • Standard Edit: This is the process of getting a draft ready for publication. The editor reads through the writer's draft and improves it for structure, clarity, and correctness, before publication.
  • DEO Edit: Sometimes our customers want to give us feedback on an earlier stage draft, before it has gone through our entire publishing pipeline. When we show off an early draft, we want it to be free of obvious errors and typos as these make us look bad and our customers tend to focus too much on small errors, which distracts from the higher level feedback we are looking for when sharing early stage work. A "Don't Embarrass Ourself (DEO)" edit is a quick check for obvious errors before sharing.
  • Overwriting: Sometimes an article needs to be delivered but the draft does not meet our standards and there is not enough time to send it back to a writer or find another writer. In this case, the Editor does an 'overwrite' - using the information in the article but rewriting and restructuring the draft as needed to meet our bar. This should only be done in exceptional cases, and if a bulldozer edit is needed, this is a sign of something having gone very wrong earlier in the process. The root cause should be identified and fixed.
  • Coaching Edit: If a writer is undergoing coaching then using their drafts can be a great learning experience. Coaching can be done in different ways (by giving more detailed feedback, by making more substantial edits, or collaboratively on a call). The goal is two-fold: primarily, to help the writer improve, but also to create a draft that we can publish.

These are not hard distinctions. For example a Bulldozer edit might be done as part of a coaching edit. An editor might choose to spend an extra 1-2 hours on a standard edit to provide more detailed feedback to a writer which can be used as part of a coaching process. But having names for different broad categories helps us discuss internally what is needed in any particular case.

Editing time goals

More time should always result in better output, but we need to prevent perfection being the enemy of good by limiting how much time we spend on any given article. Our rule-of-thumb editing times are below. These are guidelines for reference - in reality many things can affect the amount of time a given edit takes:

  • Standard Edit: 1000 words/hour
  • DEO Edit: 5000 words/hour
  • Bulldozer Edit: 500 words/hour
  • Coaching Edit: 500 words/hour (includes time allocated to writing feedback, calls, etc)

Editing strategies

Editors need to pick their battles as its not possible to do everything at once, in a limited time. It can be useful to ask 'who would notice if this change or improvement was not made?'.

  • Customer: we mispell their brand name or product name
  • Reader: there are other typos, run-on sentences, or generally poor structure
  • Another editor: there's a dangling participle, subheadings have slightly different formations, or other subtle inconsistencies

All of these are important and in most cases we should fix all mistakes, no matter who would notice them. If it's necessary to choose, follow the hierarchy above.

Similarly, if coaching a writer, it's more effective to spend more time coaching on fewer areas for improvement than to try to address everything at once. If you're working with a writer on how to structure a sentence, then ignore (for now) how to structure an entire article. The macro structure will still need to be fixed, but rather write 100 words of feedbacak on micro structure, and fix up the macro structure as a 'bulldoze' edit, than write 20 words on each and hope for a miracle improvement.