Studio Blog

Editor’s note: We will be featuring blog entries from our own creators from time to time. This installment is from Carolyn Williams on the changing role of the Demand Studios copy editors.

It’s been intriguing, watching Demand Studios grow, and as a veteran Copy Editor (CE) as well as an active member of the writing community, I get to participate in and observe both sides of the publication process. Back in the day when eHow was first created, the CE had a simple role: to check that semi-colons and other grammatical issues were correct. As Demand Studios has grown, so has the role of the CE. Now, rather than simply ensuring that grammar is acceptable, we team with the writers to ensure that the published content provides valuable, insightful, helpful advice to our readers. And we provide a simple logic check for much of that advice. After all, if you’re unstopping your sink, you don’t particularly care if the commas are all there. But you care an awful lot if “Step 2: Put a bucket under the sink to catch the water when you release the trap” is missing. Grammar issues that crop up repeatedly might be noted to the writer to avoid in future. But it’s much more time-efficient for fixes of that nature to be done by your friendly, neighborhood (okay, Internet-enabled) CE. As a CE, as you don’t get paid until the article is rewritten and comes back to your queue a second time. For simple grammar fixes, going in and fixing them is your best bet to getting paid. Larger issues get sent back to the writer.

That, in short, encapsulates how the CE job has evolved. We care as much as the writers do about the integrity of the information published on our many and varied sites. And we care for a very specific reason: job security. If our sites publish information that isn’t good, useful, well written, helpful and on task, then we’ve failed as a publishing team. Readers won’t click on our site to get information if they don’t think what we publish is useful. It becomes, then, a swirling drain. No readers, no new content to publish, no new articles to review, no editing work.

There’s a natural dissonance between the CE team and the writing team; that’s healthy, normal and part of the business of writing. We love the language, we love writing. We’re always working toward stronger, better content with the end goal of providing usable, good quality information that our readers can embrace.  There are natural bumps in the road for this 21st-century publishing business model we’re all using; development issues, technical errors, learning curves, dynamic style guides. That’s part of the environment. You either roll with it, or move to an environment that is more appropriate to your particular skills and needs. This is true for both writers and editors.

We’re all in this together, this new, modern publishing process. We deeply appreciate using and understanding the Style Guides. We’ll shepherd the content to publication wherever possible. And we'll team with the writers to make our sites increasingly helpful, useful, authoritative, well written and of high quality.