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Subject:RE: Getting more than nits from reviews? From:"Paul Hanson" <phanson -at- Quintrex -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Wed, 23 May 2007 11:47:24 -0500
A slight variation of this worked for me a few years ago. There were 6
people that needed to review a specific doc. I scheduled a single
meeting with all 6 people. I had distributed paper copies to all six a
week earlier with the instructions to review it for technical accuracy.
When we all were in the same room, one of the first things I said was
"This meeting is about the content of the doc, not the punctuation,
grammar, etc. So we're only going to focus on that. I'll take your
marked up copies and look at anything you marked up that is not
content-related outside of this meeting."
We started on the first page of content and went through it,
page-by-page. With all 6 SMEs in the room, there was debate and
discussion and many misconceptions were cleared up. The meeting went
very well when it was clear "content" was the focus and anything else
was off-limits.
-----Original Message-----
From: Pro TechWriter
<snip>
For those reviewers who won't--or can't--focus on the content in their
area of expertise, I schedule a meeting with them and go through the
document with them one-on-one. Then I can say, "okay, yeah, that needs
to be fixed, but don't worry about that. Let's get back to your
technical expertise: is this part (whatever) accurate technically?" That
approach usually works, and the next time a review is needed, they need
less "help" from me.
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