Sep. 2, 2009 at 10:37am

Be clear with your reviewers or beware

Posted by Kathleen Deakins in Internal Communications
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Divining what a writer wants from a reviewer can be as difficult as making sense of dolphin speak. Reviewers of draft copy provide the evidence.

Heard any of these?
"If you didn’t want my opinion, why did you ask me to review it?"
"Where are the changes I made to the story?"
"Oh, you didn’t want me to rewrite this?"

Knowing what we are asking of reviewers and editors, and clearly asking for it, can make the writer’s life happier and the writing better. Mangling the review process can be a career-limiting mistake.

Knowing starts with identifying your intended audience and the purpose of the writing for the reviewer.

Next, define the kind of help you seek. Working with a large health system, we recently defined two kinds of review:

Substantive review: Comment on subject matter, facts, points of policy and effectiveness of the writing for its purpose.

Confirmation review: Confirm substantive comments have been appropriately considered and addressed and that facts have not changed.

Notice that these reviews call for commenting on, not editing copy? Sometimes a reviewer may be an editor. More often, the editor is a specialist with skills and responsibilities reviewers do not have.

Politics and good manners suggest one more kind of review—the courtesy review. Be clear when you ask for one. Are you open to suggestions if the reviewer has the time and interest? Or are you providing advance notice of content that will be released?

Be sure to give every reviewer a deadline for getting comments to you and indicate if you will move forward if you have not heard back.

It is important to be clear about what we are asking of our editors as well. Consider these levels of editing:

Substantive edit: Incorporate substantive comments from reviewers. Edit for logic, flow and effectiveness for the purpose.

Tonal edit: Edit for personality, voice and readability, and to assure the writing is meaningful to the audience.

Copy edit: Edit for spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization, word choice, parallel construction, clarity, sentence length and adherence to style standards. Confirm that all reviews are complete.

Proofreading: Confirm all copy edits have been made.

Be sure it is clear who has final authority to publish or disseminate the piece. Let’s call this the signoff. This reviewer or editor has final responsibility for approving the written piece.

Fortunately, much of what we write does not require every step of review and editing. But while the shift to fast, informal, authentic communications is all around us, the angst, frustration and career jeopardy of mangling the review process remains.

Photo Credit: ©iStockphoto.com/clintspencer

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