atw: Re: Reviewers prioritising feedback

Hi Craig,

I must say you've identified an important issue in managing document revi=
ew.

Where you need to start is informing your reviewers what you want them to=
=20review. This demonstrates that there is a difference between editing (=
document orthography, carried out by professional writers) and reviewing =
(technical accuracy, procedural correctness and workability, caried out b=
y SMEs).

As a professional writer, you need to wrest document orthography away fro=
m technical reviewers -- it's *your* job after all. This actually helps y=
our technical reviewers focus on their SME role. At the same time of cour=
se, you should be quite happy to have them point out obvious orthographic=
=20(and typographic) errors.

I think your strategy of getting reviewers to code their findings is good=
. However, I also think there is advantage in identifying to your reviewe=
rs, up-front, what you want them to review.

Bede

-----Original Message-----
From: austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Craig Hadden
Sent: Thursday, 31 March 2005 12:09 PM
To: atw
Subject: atw: Reviewers prioritising feedback


What do you think of the idea of asking reviewers to
prioritise their own feedback? The suggestion is that
they write a letter (say A to D) next to each of their
comments about a draft, where for example:
* A indicates an error or serious omission.
* B indicates a lesser but definite problem, such as
discussing supplementary information before more
important information.
* C indicates an improvement, such as where the last
line of a paragraph trickles onto a second page.
* D indicates a doubtful or cosmetic change, such as
choice of words (where comprehension is affected
little, if at all) or of fonts.

This scheme helps you to immediately see which
comments you should address first, but perhaps more
importantly, it also draws the reviewer's attention to
their own focus. (In cases where it's hard to get a
reviewer to make comments in the first place, you
needn't worsen the situation by asking them to
prioritise things! Instead, you could just write the
letters yourself next to whatever feedback they give
you.)

Naturally, deciding which priority a given comment
should have is subjective, and issues don't fall
easily into neat categories, but the scheme should
make it easy to differentiate (in _everyone's_ mind)
between issues that are (for example) priority A or B
and those that are priority D.=20

Reviewers might sometimes assign higher priorities
than you would! Except in extreme cases, that
shouldn't matter. The idea is not to enter into
debates as to what the appropriate priority is for a
given comment! Rather, it's just to focus on the most
important feedback, and to make it more apparent to
reviewers when their feedback isn't as appropriate as
it might be.

What are your thoughts? Have any of you participated
in schemes like this?

(By the way, the issue arose because of a reviewer who
tended to give more feedback about grammar, word
choice and the like than about content.)

Regards,
Craig=20

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D My e-mail address is:
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D craigh(at)attachesoftware(dot)com
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D (I may not see messages sent to my Yahoo address)

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