About Smith Editing

Smith Editing specializes in business, technical, and instructional works. We can also help you with general interest and personal projects. Smith Editing has been writing, editing, and illustrating manuscripts for over 15 years.

As you work with us, you will see that Smith Editing has highly productive and versatile creators of technical and marketing documents for diverse audiences. We have deep background in learning preferences, layout design principles, and user interface design. We have applied this knowledge to printed and online documentation, Web page design and navigation, and product design.

Smith Editing is especially effective in documenting and designing new software or major enhancements to existing software. We are also highly skilled n presenting complex information in an understandable way. We focus on unscrambling the complicated, spotting the omissions and inconsistencies, and on confirming the known data.

Smith Editing has also received acclaim for designing Help systems and online viewers, and has won several awards for editing papers and quick reference cards written by hardware verification engineers.

Add expert writer or editor to your team

As writers, we can work as part of a team and produce work that looks like it was written by one author. Our work is meticulous, dependable, and professional.

As editors, we can polish your work and preserve the integrity of your style. We can identify weak or missing material and ensure that your message is communicated clearly. Our work is tactful, reliable, and valuable.

By hiring Smith Editing you are delegating to experts who do the job well. This action helps you meet your deadline, offloads work so that you can focus on what you do well, and brings in a skill set you may not have.

The goal of Smith Editing is to solve the problem you've asked us to solve as effectively and inexpensively as possible.

Good writing is invaluable

Kyle Smith, founder of Smith Editing, discovered early in her career that good writing is invaluable. In her role as front-line technical support for a computer time-sharing firm and mired under a mountain of trouble calls, she decided to write the first-ever documentation for her company. In those days instructions for using a computer, if offered at all, were a scant, coffee-stained three pages that basically said, "Follow the prompts."

Instead, she provided her customers with a complete manual that kept her users on task and out of trouble. The result was that the number of trouble calls dropped dramatically, she could focus her attention on the more unusual problems, and her customers were more effective in using the computer to do their jobs. Customer confidence increased and customers requested more tasks be automated.

Business expanded because both the customer and the support staff could be more effective in their roles as a result of well-written instructions.

Good writing brings key benefits

Smith Editing has a simple philosophy. Smith Editing believes that well-written text brings these key benefits:

No one reads a technical manual, a press release, or a corporate web page for fun. Most people use these to solve a problem trial and error hasn't solved, to keep abreast of important events, or to learn about products or services that help with a project underway.

Smith Editing prepares documents with these motivations in mind. Documents are organized for fast, random access so that readers can find complete answers easily.

Methods

A typical project begins with a request for an estimate for cost and schedule. The Connect page provides details about what information to send when you describe your project.

After reviewing your description, We'll send you (usually later that day) an estimate for the rate and completion time, and answer any of your questions.

The next step is for you to contact us to clarify any open issues about the work. In addition, we will discuss milestone dates, file formats, preferred style guides, and payment dates. If we decide to work together, then we will send you a Services Agreement that captures these details for your approval.

Once we receive a signed Services Agreement, a small deposit, and the files to start your project, then we can start addressing your project's needs.

As we complete each segment of the project, we'll send it to you for review. Assuming there's no further work needed on that segment and that you approve it as completed, we'll invoice you for that segment and continue working on the next segment. Sending small payments associated with work as it is delivered keeps you from facing a balloon payment at the end of the project.

Once we receive payment for the prior segment, we'll send you the next segment for review and approval. We will cycle through this process for as many segments as we agreed were appropriate for the project in our initial discussions.

After you approve the final segment, we will return all original source materials along with the final invoice. If the total invoice is less than the deposit amount, the difference will be returned to you with the source materials.

Setting up an account

File formats

Most of the work is done in FrameMaker, Word, PowerPoint, or HTML.

Both FrameMaker and Word can identify changes made to a document. FrameMaker uses change bars. Word uses a more elaborate scheme where deletions and insertions are visible in different formats and colors. Word also offers several ways for you to review and accept changes.

For proofreading of laid-out pages, clients often send in PDF files. We can either print them, mark them up by hand, and fax or mail them back; or we can edit them electronically using Acrobat's Touch Up feature and email you the corrected pages.

Privacy

Smith Editing protects your privacy. None of your personal information or intellectual property related to your work will be made available to an outside party. Any document sent in for an estimate is deleted immediately after sending you that estimate. All materials used during a project are returned to you upon completion of that project.

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