FW: "Weaning" strategies

[Linsey Sims <lsims -at- IPAXS -dot- COM>]

The form sounds like an excellent idea, but try to include some positive
feedback on the form.
What did the writer do very well?  etc.

Often people dislike confronting problems with their writing because
it's confusing terrain for them.  They don' t know their worst mistake
from the best sentence on the page, and everything they have heard from
writing teachers is negative.  If you include some positive feedback in
each review, the writer should develop a greater sense of "right and
wrong" and should be more attracted to reading the review in the first
place.   Or so we hope.

Good luck, Michael!


Linsey Sims
lsims -at- ipaxs -dot- com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: P Diller [SMTP:pdiller -at- MAIL -dot- STATE -dot- MO -dot- US]
> Sent: Monday, July 20, 1998 12:49 PM
> Subject:      Re: "Weaning" strategies
>
> My
> > mission, ...is to improve the quality of
> > written communication throughout our office.
> >
> > My supervisor asked me to begin proofreading documents before they
> > went out the door.
>
> First question: After you proofread, do you clean up the doc then
> issue
> it? Or do you proofread doc and return it to writer to make
> corrections?
>
> If it's the former, I can see why staff feel there's no need to change
> their current behavior. Why should they change if you're going to do
> the
> clean up work?
>
> What I've found helpful in the past was to develop a form, which I
> attached to the original when I returned it to the writer. I'd make
> notes on the doc itself (primarily typos), but I'd use the form to
> explain grammatical rules or style suggestions.
>
> The advantage of the form is that one can track the most common
> errors.
> This information can be used to target training. Also, the writer can
> keep the form for future reference.
>
> P Diller