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Subject:RE: dangers of spellcheck From:mlist -at- safenet-inc -dot- com To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Mon, 30 Oct 2006 09:05:08 -0500
Bonnie Granat [mailto:bgranat -at- granatedit -dot- com] wrote (with hardly any
typos):
> Even if you read your own work over, you will still miss things like
> those--or far worse; that's why editors are needed to ensure
> quality in
> documentation. Writers cannot edit themselves and do as good a job as
> someone who is not as close to the text.
There's the rub.
Actually, you can do a good job on your own text... but only
after it's too late. That's a rule, enforced by the universe.
Really. If you put the work aside for a time, you'll come
back to it with essentially "fresh" eyes. Oh, the horrors
you'll discover. "For a time" means weeks, not hours. You
need time to lose some of the intimate familiarity with your own
verbiage.
So, the handiest tool in the box is the one that (I'd venture
to guess) most of us don't have and never will - an editor.
Even a peer review is often out of the question. Each of the
writers in my company for example is widely separated from
the others, geographically, and responsible for milti-product
product lines, or even multiple product lines, usually with
overlapping release schedules. I mean, overlapping schedules
for the products a given writer is expected to cover.
So, essentially there's not really any downtime when one can
apply the peepers to another's work. Certainly, no break
in the schedule will ever coincide with the time when another
writer _needs_ a review (i.e., before the docs go out the door).
On a related note, an article at the back of last week's
employment section in the local newspaper noted how just
two or three typos in a resumé or cover letter can get
an applicant dropped from consideration. If they won't
pay attention to detail when it's that important, how
can employers expect them to be sharp on the job?
A hiring manager was quoted as saying that he scans
submissions quickly and uses the presence of typos as
the first cut. Only a truly stellar resumé can recover
from that dismissal. So get somebody else to read
your resumé and cover letter.
Kevin
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