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Well, I make it a practice to send all of my work out for technical review
- especially on this contract I'm doing now (state of PA, CDC, HIPAA stuff).
But I have had some bad experiences with tech reviews. I used to send a
form along but discovered that the reviewers seldom bothered to read
it. So the last time I sent out a doc for review, I called one of the
reviewers and explained that I was sending him a draft and I needed the
technical information reviewed and not to bother with spelling, grammar, or
usage problems since I never clean up a document until I am sure I have
nailed the tech stuff. He told me he understood.
When I got it back, there were comments on fonts (I was using the avant
garde stuff like Times New Roman and Verdana), capitalization, syntax - and
nothing on the technical material.
I called the reviewer and asked him what happened. He told me that he
finds it too distracting to review the technical material when there are
other glitches in the document and that after I resolve all of the issues
he noted, he would be happy to review the technical content.
I told him I understood his situation and mentioned that I had 85
screenshots of misspelled words and other usage errors that existed in the
interface. I asked him if I should send them to him (since he's in charge
of the interface). His response? "Don't bother. We don't deal with those
things until we have the technical stuff working properly."
Russ Shade
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