tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6126042.post-1078188617885512252004-03-02T00:50:00.000Z2004-03-02T01:09:43.610Z One of the problems in talking about the e-editor's work is the lack of hard facts. What we need is more empirical evidence about what we do and what is really involved. That's why we have started putting e-editors into cages and measuring their pulse and blink rates while they work. It's why we've strapped electrodes to their hands and introduced scan path analysis equipment to track their eye movements. It's why we use real-time CAT scanning to observe their brain activity while they're writing headlines. Or it might be, if anyone could be bothered. Instead, to try to get some crude indicators of what e-editors really do at work all day, we've invested in some new capital equipment that doesn't rely so much on high technology. We've got a clicker. All the clicker does is count. Whenever you tap it with a finger or the flat of your hand, it adds one to the previous total. It's the sort of gadget they use to count cars in traffic surveys. Nightclubs give them to the bouncers to keep track of how many people are dehydrating inside. But we're using them to see just how many decisions a sub-editor makes per page, per hour or per day. And the figures are already quite startling. There were some similar experiments, years ago, where men were given clickers and told to click throughout the day each time they thought about sex. Though some of the clickers simply broke through metal fatigue, the surviving counters showed figures of anything from 400 to 2,000 clicks a day. And our clicker experiment is already showing us just how many decisions we all take when we work our way through a piece of text. Spending an hour or so on a light "first pass" edit on a piece of fairly technical IT material can easily involve 150 to 200 separate editing decisions. At the other end of the process, proofing, too, can rack up extraordinary numbers very quickly. There'll be much more detail and analysis of the figures when we have more results to work on. But the first, dramatic insight is that it is not at all surprising that e-editors occasionally make mistakes. If people are taking several hundred discrete editorial decisions in the course of a working day, it is hardly surprising that they may get some of them wrong. The managers who come back to us gleefully pointing out a typo here and a verbal infelicity there should be aware that the individual who perpetrated these crimes has probably taken 700 correct decisions that day, all of which are likely to go wholly unremarked. If there are two errors out of 700, that may not meet the engineer's beloved Six Sigma quality standards, but it's pretty good going in the real world. The concentration – indeed, the sheer stamina – needed to do this kind of work is seldom understood. And at least, by doing some rough and ready research into the number of decisions various document types and levels of editing involve, we're starting to shed a bit of factual light on a previously hazy area. If anyone else likes the idea of investing £10 in a clicker and joining us in our experiments, we'd be very happy to share the results with a wider audience. We know there are marketing companies, charities and construction firms and legal partnerships tuned in to this blog and to e-editor.co.uk, and we'd welcome the chance to add some input from the widest possible range of sources. It's time we had more facts to back our arguments, so let's get clicking. ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00882602151850785568noreply@blogger.com