What price technical editing? Phase I: Reaching a lay audience

Qualitative audience responses to editorial treatment and non-treatment in terms of comprehension and evaluation of message and source were compared. This experiment was conducted in response to the trend in government and industry to cut back on editorial expenses by issuing “quick and dirty” reports. The design included: exposing subjects to a split-run of messages and administering a cloze-type exercise to test for comprehensibility differences between treatments and then a post-exposure Likert-scale evaluation to compare effects of treatment on variables of reader selectivity, (message acceptability, source credibility, information-seeking, and homophily). In the next phase, a stratified sampling will allow comparison of technically-trained and non-technically trained audiences. From an examination of lay audiences tested here, a strong correlation emerged between editorial treatment and reader comprehension (21.3% improvement from unedited to edited treatment), task completion time (21.5% decline), and message acceptability (20% increase). Results indicate that if editors do not invest editorial time in a manuscript, then each reader must. And, according to acceptability scores, some will not. Communicators are urged to gain a better understanding of the complexity and responsibilities of the editorial role the tools of scientific inquiry so vital for answering the sorts of practical questions they must confront. Without these, they cannot adequately fulfill responsibilities to authors, organizations, and audiences.