Writing is an important communication skill that can make, or break, a first impression. Your clients demand excellence in written communications. The AVS writing team will assist you in presenting yourself to clients by refining your copy and/or creating new copy. AVS will transform your writing into succinct, understandable, grammatically correct information.

It is important to express yourself to your clients clearly and accurately. Good writing is easy to understand—readers notice and appreciate it.

Likewise, readers notice and remember poor writing, and may infer that your focus is not on ensuring that your work is error-free. Through association, that inference reflects on the product or service that you market.

Our writing and copy editing services include

• Technical writing
• Information design and formatting
• Copy editing
• technical
• marketing and advertising
• globalization

The AVS writing team can put technical information into easily understandable language. They prepare operating and maintenance manuals, catalogs, parts lists, assembly instructions, sales promotion materials, and so on. Our team has engineering experience, and often works with client engineers to prepare written engineering content, installation and operation manuals, and other information for both technical audiences and general readership.

Our AVS writing team includes graphic design experts and is experienced with various software programs on multiple platforms. They plan and edit technical materials and oversee the preparation of illustrations, photographs, and other visual collateral material.

When required, style revisions will be suggested or implemented. These could include page numbers, margins, headings, spacing, indentations, paragraph structure, references, and so on.

AVS provides copy editing services at several levels for technical, marketing and advertising copy.

• Light (baseline) copy editing. Light copy editing is an extension of proofreading that does a more thorough check using grammar rules.
• Medium (standard) copy editing. During medium copy editing, AVS additionally checks for style consistency and relationships between text and graphics. Table-of-contents entries and organizational problems are also corrected.
• Heavy (substantive) copy editing. Heavy copy editing increases the level of judgment and rewriting involved. In a heavy copy edit, editors on the AVS writing team try to improve the flow of text by rewriting portions to enforce a uniform level, tone, and focus. They change passive voice to active voice and add missing articles (a, an, the). They also rearrange sentences to improve readability. This is particularly true with technical copy. For example, the phrase “hermetic two stage gear drive compressor,” is made more readable by adding a bit of punctuation, like this: “hermetic, two-stage, gear-drive compressor.”

The AVS writing team includes a globalization copy editor, who is trained in international and cultural issues and is familiar with the challenges that translators face. In addition to all the normal functions of copy editing, the globalization copy editor focuses on eliminating ambiguity of any form. The purpose is to make the translation process easier, while working with authors to ensure that changes do not affect technical accuracy of the information. The globalization copy editor also advises customers about aspects of writing that are affected by international publishing of information. This includes characters such as "#" and "&" that do not exist in some languages or have multiple meanings. Another problem area is dates, where 2/5/02 in the United States generally means February 5, but in most European countries, it means May 2.