Review: An Imperative

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