RE: Venting about reviewing? Make it harder for the reviewers to comp lain!

["John Locke" <mail -at- freelock -dot- com>]

Geoff Hart wrote, regarding Ann Nonymous's having to track every little
change:

> One trick that works very well is to make two passes
> through a document, something that most editors do as a matter of
> course. In
> the first pass, leave revision tracking off, and correct all the
> obvious and
> simple errors that don't require author approval: typos, inconsistencies
> (assuming you can confirm which of the several inconsistent usages is
> correct), double spaces after periods, or anything that is spelled out
> clearly in your style guide (e.g., using numerals for numbers greater than
> 10 and words for smaller numbers). Why make them spend the time approving
> things that you don't require their approval to change? Adopting this
> approach cuts enormous amounts of work; they won't be happy no matter what
> you do, but at least they'll have less to complain about.
>

Well, here's one reason not to do it this way, and it's probably why they
wanted track changes on... Perhaps the Word document is not the source
document, but rather, text exported from some other tool.

In a previous project, we had a custom authoring tool for creating an expert
system. The text in this system lived in "nodes" as a simple database field.
The only formatting for this text was HTML, and to make localization tools
work better, we ended up switching to something very like XHTML.

But due to the tricky nature of the authoring tool, we did not want our
reviewers mucking about in it. So we exported all of the text to Word and
sent it to them as a document with Track Changes turned on. We then had to
go through all changes one by one, and manually re-enter them in the
authoring tool.

With all of the HTML out there, I'm sure this isn't an isolated case. In
fact, when I'm incorporating editors' comments, I almost always go through
the changes one by one, because other people are simultaneously reviewing
the text for other things, and while the editor is going through it, I've
likely inserted new figures, updated tables, etc.

The point is, reviewer's copies are just that--copies, not the original.

It sounds like what Anny needs is not permission to change her copy, but to
be closer to the source of the text. In the project I mentioned earlier, we
had an editor on our team trained in the use of the special tool, and she
did an editing pass on everything before we sent it out.

So I agree wholeheartedly with Geoff that editors need to make changes
without having change tracking on all the time--but point out that often
that means changing HTML or XML source directly. And the developers may be
(rightly) wary of giving an English-Lit type access to the appropriate tool.

Anny has, by the thoroughness of her work, proven that she has a substantial
need to access those source files. If she can prove her competence by not
mucking up the code as well, I'm sure they'll let her into the appropriate
source files to do her thing. It's just part of that initial proving your
worth to the team.

Cheers,
John Locke
http://www.freelock.com



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