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I'm soliciting opinions on who should do onscreen review of documentation
(delivered electronically) in a company with no dedicated editing
department. Should it be the person who wrote the documents? Should it be
another writer who didn't write the documents? Should it be someone else I
haven't thought of?
Assume that the documents have had one grammatical/style editorial pass at
an earlier stage, one SME pass for content validation, and this is the
brush-up, check-the-links, find-that-glaring-comma-fault onscreen review
before release.
Elizabeth,
Firstly, I think it has to be a writer who does the review (sorry if I'm
being too obvious). Whether or not it is the original author depends on your
confidence in the content after the SME has made changes. If a lot of
changes were made, it could be that more editorial work is needed and then I
would say it should be the original author. If you feel the content is good
to go, I think it is fine to have someone else go through and do the final
proof and clean up.
Having said all this, there are only two of us at my company and we deal
with our own documents from start to finish. That is more because of timing
issues than anything else.
Deb Beckett
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