Portfolio Project | Technical Writing
Comprehensive Editing: Legal Guide
When editing complex documents with technical and/or legal details, I edit in multiple passes, starting with structural edits, before moving on to line editing and proofreading.
For this project, I edited Utah Drug and Alcohol laws for an audience of college students. I started with a plain text document that was difficult to scan and reference.
After assessing the document’s content, I decided to reformat the content to prioritize readability and consistency for my target audience.
I reorganized the order of sections document to give the information a more logical flow, revised the sentence structure to reduce repetitive phrases, and used bullet points to consolidate information.
In the introduction, I also added a table summarizing the differences between the legal punishments listed in the document (as well as a paragraph linking the relevant sections of the Utah criminal code) to make the document more usable for its lay audience.