Having technical documentation and manuals edited

Reviewed by Benjamin Lohrer, editor at corrected.eu · Last updated: 28 July 2026

Standardise terminology, action steps and warning notices

Editing for technical documentation is measured by a single question: can the user act after reading? Manuals rarely fail because of spelling. They fail because of inconsistent terminology and unclear action steps, and because of one rule that contradicts the general feel for language.

Variety is a mistake here

In any other text, repeating a word counts as a weakness. In technical documentation it is a requirement: a component has exactly one name, an action exactly one verb.

If you write alternately about the sealing cap, the cover and the lid, the reader will ask whether three different parts are meant. In assembly instructions that costs time, and in a safety instruction it can become dangerous. We therefore standardise consistently and report every variant that appears in the document.

Action steps must be actionable

"The screw is to be loosened" names neither the person who acts nor the moment. "Loosen the screw" is unambiguous. We consistently put instructions into the imperative and also check the sequence: does the precondition come before the action? Is the result named by which the user can tell that the step is complete?

A frequent finding is steps that have been merged: "Loosen the screws and remove the assembly after you have isolated the system." Here the first action to be carried out comes at the end of the sentence. We break up such sentences into the actual sequence.

Equally often, the reference is missing for figure callouts. "See the figure above" works in a PDF, but not in an online help system where the arrangement depends on the output format. We replace such position references with numbered references and report figures that no text refers to.

Warning notices in a uniform pattern

Warning notices need a consistent pattern of signal word, type of hazard, consequence of ignoring it and measure to avoid it. In documentation that has grown over time, different signal words are used for the same hazard level, because individual chapters were written at different times.

We check the consistency of structure and signal word levels and report deviations. We do not check whether a warning conforms to the relevant standard. That remains the task of your technical editorial team.

A terminology list as a by-product

If you bring a terminology list, we check against it. If none exists, one is created during the work: we collect every naming variant we find and return a cleaned-up overview.

For the next product generation, this is often the more valuable part of the delivery, because it lets you set up the documentation consistently from the start instead of catching variants later. For translated versions we additionally check, on request, against the source document for completeness and terminological fidelity.

Terms for documentation projects

Billing runs through a free business account: proofreading from €1.90, editing from €4.90 per standard page of 1,800 characters. Extensive documentation quickly reaches the volume thresholds: from 500 pages 11 per cent off editing, from 1,000 pages 15 per cent.

One special feature applies to quotes: documentation contains many short blocks of text, tables and figures. The number of standard pages is therefore well below the number of layout pages. We name the fixed price after looking at an excerpt, not by the page count of the PDF.

As a rule we work on exports. We accept structured formats from content management systems by arrangement.

Further reading: business terms at a glance and whitepaper editing.