This assignment asks you to edit--to improve upon--the professional writing of another person by applying the principles of SCAMP--style, chunking, audience, message, and purpose. You may do the assignment individually or in collaborative groups. Critiquing and then revising someone else's writing may give you a better understanding of the basic components of successful professional writing.

Editing is (or should be) what the psychologists call a top-down process, moving from major, overall concerns to relatively minor details. The temptation for the editor is to reverse the process, making editing a bottom-up process starting with the details (and perhaps never moving at all to the larger aspects of a document). Your main job in this assignment is to keep your eye on the big picture, on the document's purpose and on how the achievement of that purpose can be made more likely. Details, such as spelling and punctuation, are important but not nearly so important as purpose and the information provided to achieve that purpose.

Top-level concerns: purpose and message
The major, top-level concerns of professional writing are purpose and message; editing starts with these. A document is of no use at all if its purpose/goal is not clear to a reader relatively early in the reading. It must also contain the information that is necessary to obtain that goal. Most professional documents probably ought to contain the minimal amount of information necessary to obtain the purpose--enough to get the job done but not so much that a reader loses sight of the point.

Purpose can be clarified by making sure it is fronted in a document--stated very early and then consistently reinforced by the information of the document and restated in the conclusion. However, when the purpose is at odds with the purposes of your audience--when you are in some way your audience's antagonist--then there should probably be a "buffer" between your document's beginning and the statement of your purpose. Any kind of conveying of bad news is usually buffered, as are acts that somehow "threaten" your reader--asking for money, for example. Nevertheless, if you must ask for money, I would suggest alluding to your purpose fairly early in the letter, saying something like, "I'm writing to ask for your help in curing this deadly disease." You can wait until later to specify dollar amounts in a suggestion like, "Your gift of $30, $60, or $100 will reserve your complimentary gift."  On the other hand, if you have any good news to convey--if you are giving something away, for example--then start with the good news.

Your information is the bridge or path you want your reader to take to your goal. Ask yourself, "What needs to be said in order to achieve the document's goal? If I want my audience to do or know X, then I must tell it what?" If, for example, you are writing a sales letter to a homeowner attempting to persuade the homeowner to make his/her next purchase of X at your store, ask yourself, "What does the homeowner need to know most about what my store offers?  What's most important to the homeowner that I can inform him/her about?"  Those questions bring us to audience.

Mid-level concern: audience appeal
Audience appeal is almost as important as the first two; if the audience understands the purpose of a document and possesses the information it needs to, but if it is alienated by the document or simply ignored, then a writer will fail to achieve the purpose or convey the information. The ancient rhetoricians (like Aristotle and Cicero, for example), thought an audience/a reader ought to be appealed to in three ways in any given text:

• Emotionally: Connect your purpose and information to what the reader values or cares about. Show your reader how what you want him/her to know or to do will further his/her interests. Even, for example, in putting forth a set of instructions, technical writers often need to "sell" the importance of the process and try to persuade readers that they will benefit from studying the instructions before they attempt the process. One way to sell your document is to connect it to your audience's self-interest. If, for example, you want apartment dwellers to keep their complex clean, you might want to point out that a clean complex attracts the best sort of neighbors to live next to.

• Ethically: Project an image of the writer that inspires confidence, trust, and admiration. Show your reader that you are purposeful, that you know what you're talking about, and that any sane person would want to help you to achieve your purpose. One simple ethical appeal is to project a professional, competent image by using standard written conventions correctly, such as spelling and punctuation. Also, try to figure out how formal or informal you should be; if you are too informal and chatty, you come across as someone who isn't to be taken seriously, whereas you will appear stuffy and out-of-touch if you are perceived to be taking yourself too seriously.

• Logically: Make good sense. In the oldest of terms, this means presenting reasons for what you say and/or what you want a reader to do. The best of these reasons make the most sense to the audience, which is a little different than saying that the best reason is the one that makes the most sense, period. If, for example, you are trying to sell air conditioners and air conditioning servicing in the South during the summer or as summer is approaching, you might mention that no one wants to be without air conditioning because of an out-of-date system or one that has not been well maintained. That sort of reason is logical but also emotionally engaging.

Mid-level concern: chunking of information
If you say all the right things but present the information in the wrong order, in a way that does not reflect the kinds of information you present, or in a way that does not make it easy for your reader to see what information is where, then your information might fail to have the impact you want.

Because information at the start of segments and at the end of segments gets noticed, you should consider starting and ending your document's segments with important information, leaving less important information in the middle. Warnings in instructions, for example, should not be buried in the middle of a paragraph after readers have been instructed to do a potentially dangerous step. Instead, front the warning before the step.

The design of your document ought to reflect the information presented. If, for example, you have ten points to make, you might present those ten points in a ten-point list. The look of such a list suggests that the ten points are all different, separate points of equal value. If, however, some of the points go together, then they should probably be organized in sections that reflect the two or three groups of points that go together. That's chunking. Look for segments of the document that go together, and then group them to show that they are related. Headings for sections give readers signposts for what is ahead and provide them places to pause and reflect on what they have read. A long series of single-spaced paragraphs with no heads is extremely daunting, especially to readers who do not know in advanced what the document is all about.

Remember that professional writing is regularly read by people in a hurry who need to extract information quickly and who might need to refer to the writing again. So a document should advertise what information is where. That advertising can be done by many means: heads, horizontal white space, vertical white space (lists and columns), visuals, and judicious use of font styles such as bold, italic, capitalization, and underlining. Add heads, for example, to sections of a document that go together, and put long lists in column form. Clip art can also be employed to draw the eye to especially important ideas and sections.

Bottom-level concern: style
Style is word choice and sentence structure, including punctuation, mechanics, and spelling. Style is important because it can create a poor image of the writer if it's bad. On the other hand, style can further a writer's purpose if it's good. So what's good style? The oldest tradition lists four elements of good style:

• Correctness: In general, professional writers pay attention to the "standard" spelling, mechanical, and punctuation conventions. The most serious errors are those that suggest the writer habitually speaks a non-standard dialect: lack of subject-verb agreement (e.g., they was), missing inflectional endings (e.g., I work there for five year), and irregular pronoun forms (e.g., theirself).

• Clarity: Business and technical writers should state things simply and avoid trying to sound like business writers. If you are trying to sound like the writer of an important business letter or a really difficult technical manual, then the letter will sound phony and the manual will be unreadable.

• Appropriateness: Professional writers' words and sentences should be right given the reader and the subject matter. For example, if your document's subject is a technical one and your readers are insiders of the technical field, they expect the appropriate amount of technical jargon that outsiders to the subject would not understand. However, a document presenting a technical subject to non-specialists must avoid the jargon.

• Dignity: Nothing should be said that will result in your losing "face" as a writer. In this day and age, for example, sexist language makes a writer look way behind the times, unable to change.