This was a question my 8-year-old asked me this morning in the drop-off line at her school. It was such an excellent question! It really got me thinking. “Is it easy?” Sometimes. “Is it hard?” More like more-or-less challenging at times. I tried to compare it to her math homework. She’s pretty good at math and really likes doing her homework. “What if you got math every day and it was always addition problems? You’d still have to do it, but you know how to do addition pretty well, right?” “yep!” “Say, now-and-then there’s a multiplication problem in there, you can do that too, it’ll just take more thinking. It’s kind of like that.” I went on to explain,

Sometimes patterns are fairly simple and take only a read through to edit them. If the pattern is simply sc in each st across then there’s not any math that needs to be done. However, if it’s sc in first 7 sts then work [chain 2, skip 1, sc in next 5] across, well then I have to create an equation to make sure it works. It’s kind of like a word problem then…..In fact, the entire pattern is like one word problem after another.

That’s when I decided to write a blog post about it. Word problems, but about crochet. That’s what patterns are to a tech editor. Sure, there’s also the normal English grammar, spelling, and punctuation. There’s getting the crochet abbreviations and lingo correct. But when it comes to the math part, it’s like word problems. If the challenge of figuring out how to write the equation for this…

Johnny leaves Nantucket at 3pm and arrives in Kalamazoo at 9pm, and the train makes 4 stops of 10-minutes each along the way, how fast did the train need to travel between stops?

…is fun for you…then you might be a tech editor! I know that some people are shouting at their screen right now saying “eeeeeffffffff no!” and I get that, there are things that I’ll dismiss immediately. But there are others that have already tried to create the equation. (They’re also saying, “we’re missing vital information, Emily!!”) If that’s YOU, then you really need to consider becoming a tech editor.

If math is fun for you, be a tech editor. If you love collecting patterns and don’t make them all, but still collect them, be a tech editor. If you tend to find mistakes in those patterns, be a tech editor. I’m not even going to get into the financial aspect of it. It’s just fun.

Check out my course on what you need to become a tech editor. Let me know if you have any questions along the way. I’m here to answer them. It’s ok to start small, that’s how it goes. Sometimes it’ll be easy, but sometimes you’ll get a really fun pattern. See what I did there? Not hard, not even challenging, just oooo, fun.