Using a checklist keeps the work consistent
Checklists are an essential tool for ensuring that the editing you do is both comprehensive and consistent. Checklists can help you determine the level of edit a particular doc needs and they can help you stay within the bounds of that level — or at least, remind you when you’re editing to one level and when to another. Technical editors often haven’t the luxury of working within one level alone, but must address whatever issues there are in the time allotted. In cases such as those, a checklist can help you document what you’ll not be able to get to in the current schedule, what issues will need to be carried over to the next release. A checklist can also help you explain to your manager (or client) and the writer the sorts of things you’ll be reviewing for.
In addition to levels of edit checklists, you might want to work with a checklist that summarizes the qualities you’d expect to find in a document of the sort you’re currently editing, if written by your top writer. A checklist such as this can also be a tool for ensuring that your work is complete and consistent from doc to doc (of the type addressed by that checklist). It can be used as a tool by your writers when developing their docs. It can be the basis of an eventual style guide or a stand-in for one, along with stylesheets, in the meantime. To use doc checklists like this well, you’d develop one for each specific doc type you work with. Or account for the different types within a single checklist, if that proves manageable.
Here’s the start of a potential tech editing checklist, something for you to use as a template, if you’d like, something to build on with the particulars of the documents you work on. It’s in Google Docs, in view mode. To get an editable version, make a copy.
How distinct the different doc types are that you work on will determine whether you ought to develop a separate checklist for each type or whether you can create one master checklist with some sections that apply to specific types.
This particular checklist contains additional notes so as to be more useful both to novice editors and to groups of editors. The additional notes also help to better orient stakeholders (writers, SMEs, the project manager, and so on) to what the editor will be reviewing for.