How often do you shoot an email all in a jiffy to hit the Send button, fully confident of its
content, only to realize later that you missed mentioning something of
relevance, or you had misplaced a few commas here and there because of which,
your email does not convey what you intended to. Perhaps, a quick review would
have saved you the mortification of having sent something which you yourself
find amiss.
That is why review is important.
Any work, followed by review, results into a better and more
appropriate work.
What is the purpose of
review?
Review refers to ‘a formal assessment of something with
the intention of instituting change if necessary’, as defined in the
Oxford Dictionary.
The sole purpose of review is to make changes, if valid… and
if necessary, for the betterment of the thing in context. There’s no doubt
review offers grist to the mill.
Importance of review
in the field of Technical Writing
‘Time moves in one
direction, memory in another.’ – William Gibson.
Does this ring a bell? I bet, it does! J Therefore, it is only fitting
that a proper and thorough review is awarded at every stage…right from audience
profiling to content development and publishing.
Technical Writing warrants requisite information to be
presented in a digestible form and language to convey the crux to the point. To
envelope all the relevant matter and yet keep the communication simple and tidy
demands patience and skills. However, the most important thing this demands is
a proper review… without which, you run the risk of producing an untamed material
which you cannot vouch for!
Review
can be broadly classified into three major categories: Self review, peer review
and functional/technical review.
Whatever
the style, your content ought to be reviewed for language, accuracy and
relevance.
Review
is vastly practiced in all streams and not just Technical Writing and
communications alone.
If you
come to ponder, even Testing is nothing but ‘review’ of the codes, using which
an application is developed…so as to ascertain its output. Isn’t it?
Dos and Don’ts
One very important thing to understand is that the purpose
of review is to simply scrub clean the subject, if and where necessary. The motive of a review must NEVER be to
disdain something or someone. True professionalism holds good only when you have
the intent of performing all tasks entrusted with zero derision and 100% focus
on the improvement of the project. In the same spirit, if the project requires
amendments or major changes, it must be duly attended to and verified, without
harbouring the typically false notion of ‘How can I be wrong’, because like it
or not but… nobody is perfect J.
-- T
