Seven Ways to Improve the Technical Writing Review Process

Writ­ing and prepar­ing tech­ni­cal con­tent for a review can be seam­less or stress­ful, depend­ing on dead­lines, the tools and tech­nol­o­gy, and the team per­son­al­i­ties and dynam­ics.  Here are sev­en ways to make tech­ni­cal reviews easier.

1. Lim­it the num­ber of  Sub­ject Mat­ter Experts (SMEs) to four or five peo­ple. I recent­ly worked with a client who was attempt­ing to get 20 peo­ple with dis­parate views to agree to a doc­u­ment. If some of those peo­ple don’t like each oth­er or are not moti­vat­ed to get the work done, shep­herd­ing the doc­u­ment towards the “fin­ish line” is close to impossible.
   
2. Use a col­lab­o­ra­tion tool like Share­Point or Con­flu­ence. Send­ing out reviews by email has its share of lim­i­ta­tions. One of the main weak­ness­es is that SMEs can­not eas­i­ly see each oth­er com­ments. When there are dif­fer­ences of opin­ion on a cer­tain para­graph or sen­tence, it can cre­ate more work for tech­ni­cal writ­ers as they may need to fol­low-up with mul­ti­ple SMEs to rec­on­cile the con­flict­ing edits. Tools like Share­Point and Con­flu­ence enable SMEs to review con­tent online and see all the oth­er comments.
3. For con­tentious top­ics, arrange SMEs to sit in the same room. If you expect that your SMEs will have strong opin­ions about a giv­en sub­ject, arrange to have them sit in the same room and dis­cuss the con­tent. Try­ing to get con­sen­sus via e‑mail is hard­er than face-to-face meetings.
4. Ask that SMEs focus on review­ing the accu­ra­cy of the con­tent. Remind SMEs that you want them to focus on the accu­ra­cy of the con­tent, not the pre­sen­ta­tion or for­mat­ting or writ­ing styles.
5. Con­sid­er pro­vid­ing sug­ges­tions on the type of feed­back you’d like. I can­not tell you how many times I’ve seen SMEs high­light a sen­tence and write “???”. If some­thing is con­fus­ing or mis­lead­ing, encour­age SMEs to rewrite it.
6. Set expec­ta­tions about how the review cycle works. Remind the client that the review cycle typ­i­cal­ly takes two to three iter­a­tions and that the con­tent doesn’t always need to be “per­fect.” The nice thing about doc­u­ments is con­tent can always be revised and improved for a future release.
7. Con­sid­er using out­lines. If con­tent is com­pli­cat­ed or the mate­r­i­al is con­tentious, I’ve found it’s a lot eas­i­er to revise an out­line than to revamp or restruc­ture exist­ing content.

What strate­gies or tac­tics do you use to expe­dite or improve the tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion review process?