By Mary Headley
If your company or nonprofit is like many others, you’re writing that
important document right up until it’s time to send it out. A quality
assurance review has not been built into the schedule and now you find yourself
with neither the time nor the resources to do a full edit on that important
document you worked so hard on. I would be the last person to encourage you
to forego the critical quality assurance step. However, sometimes you are caught
short—so what do you do? The good news is that doing a few short editing
passes in critical areas is better than doing nothing. So here are some tips
to optimize the benefits of what you can do fairly quickly:
- Be sure there is an executive summary, abstract or introduction
section. Make sure there is a concise summary of what your document
is all about and why people should read it, together with enough background
information so the subject is clear, even to management and nontechnical readers.
A common mistake is to dive right into a topic, especially a technical one,
thereby losing many readers from the start. In longer documents, be sure to
label the abstract/summary/introduction section as such so that it can be
easily found by skimming.
- Be sure there is a conclusion or recommendations section.
Make sure your conclusion—research findings, recommended course of action,
how to contact you, or whatever—are succinctly stated. Don’t force
people to read between the lines to find your closing message or call to action.
Again, be sure to set this message off—or label this section in longer
documents—so that it can be easily found by skimming.
- Carefully edit the summary/introduction and conclusion/recommendations
sections. Many people don’t read much beyond these two sections,
so make sure they are impeccable. Remember, first impressions do count, so
you don’t want embarrassing mistakes here.
- Edit document title, section headings, table/figure captions and
figure labels. Make sure these important areas are clean, as errors
here are more obvious. Even people who are just skimming the rest of your
document will tend to read these elements.
- Look for common errors and globally fix them. Mistakes
are often repeated—for example, if you have written “discreet”
instead of “discrete” once, there’s a good chance you may
have made the same mistake again. When you spot such an error in one of the
key areas mentioned above, use the power of your software’s global search
and replace function to quickly clean these up, even in sections you don’t
have the time to thoroughly edit.
- Check all numbers and dates. Skim your document for dollar
amounts, percentages, figures and dates; then verify, at a minimum, these
are consistent (if you can easily do so, also verify they are correct). Numbers
frequently change in the course of writing, and often don’t get changed
in all places; few things will damage your document’s credibility more
than inaccurate or inconsistent numbers. And if your document has an assigned
part number or document number, make sure it is correct!
- Check for an appropriate copyright statement. Help protect
your organization’s ownership rights to your document by including a
copyright statement up front, checking with your organization’s legal
advisor, as appropriate. For example: Copyright © 2005, Information Engineering
Company. All rights reserved.
- Check for correct product/company names and trademark statements.
Make sure your organization’s name is spelled correctly and consistently
throughout your document. For example, if your organization’s
name is Company ABC, Inc., correct such variations as ABC Company. Similarly,
if your organization has named products or programs, especially if written
with unusual capitalizations (like U_NameIt), make sure these are spelled
correctly and consistently. If your organization has trademarked any
of these names, be sure to include the appropriate trademark statement
in the front of your document. For example: U_NameIt is a registered
trademark of Company ABC, Inc. Finally, if you mention names that belong
to other companies/organizations, consider adding the following blanket
statement to avoid potential problems: Other names mentioned may be
trademarks of other companies or organizations.
- Verify document’s structural integrity. This includes
checking that all pages are present (and in the right order), that there are
no missing graphics (or graphics that run off a page) and that any running
page headers and footers are correct. Also, if your document has a table of
contents or index, check a few entries to verify that the page number references
are accurate.
- Run your software’s spell-checker program. Even
though spell-checker programs won’t catch missing or misused words,
they do flag many potential spelling errors very quickly, so be sure to do
one final spell-check pass just before your document goes out the door.
About the author:
Mary Headley performs editorial services for print documents
and websites through her business, Information Engineering Company (http://www.inform-engine.com).
She feels this article describes key quality assurance checks that are
common to many business and technical documents, although there are many
other edits to be done that are likely to greatly improve the overall
quality of your document—edits that are specific to the particular
type of document at hand and that are probably best done by a professional
editor. Contact her for a free consultation to learn how you can make
your next communication project more successful, regardless of the amount
of time or budget you have available.
© 2005, Mary Headley, Information Engineering Company
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