Re: Thoughts on Working With Developers (long)

[Tracy Boyington <tracy_boyington -at- OKVOTECH -dot- ORG>]

> Technical edits may be what we need from them, but it does make me wonder what
> kind of drafts people are expecting their SMEs to read.  Typos and grammatical
> errors sometimes creep into the drafts I give my SMEs.  However, I try to get
> rid of them as much as possible before reviews.
> (snip)
> I'm curious, how "rough" do most people consider okay when they're giving an SME
> a document?

Our rough drafts are not that rough -- in fact, some of my co-workers
provide formatted copy for SMEs to look over (I don't; it depends on
your SME and the intricacies of your format).

My SMEs are Es in two areas -- teaching and the particular subject
matter that's being taught. So I ask them to look for mistakes or
anything that could be improved in those two areas. I tell them the
document will be edited by a copy editor and therefore they shouldn't
worry about grammar and punctuation errors, although I do ask them to
notice the spelling of technical terms. Of course, they still find
non-technical errors, which is fine. They also catch sentences that
could be more clear if they were written a different way, which is also
fine. So, what works best for me is (a) provide as clean a copy as
possible, (b) emphasize what you *want* the SMEs to catch, and (b)
consider anything else they catch as a bonus.

Tracy
--
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Tracy Boyington         mailto:tracy_boyington -at- okvotech -dot- org
Oklahoma Dept. of Vocational & Technical Education
Curriculum & Instructional Materials Center
Stillwater, Oklahoma    http://www.okvotech.org/cimc/
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