Rewriting versus writing from scratch?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Stina Lane-Cummings manages <<... a seven-person documentation team. We're
at a crossroads where we can make a decision about who writes white
papers... There are two thoughts: Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) should
write, and the docs team should polish the SMEs' work. I don't like this
idea because of what happened during our test case... Even the best writing
done by SMEs takes so much time to untangle and rewrite that the writers
should write from scratch, using the SMEs as clients/consultants, because
it's faster for both parties and easier for the SMEs.>>

If your second option is objective fact, or as close as we poor mortals can
get to it, and your test case proved that an SME who writes reasonably well
still can't write good white papers, then it sounds like you don't have a
choice: your writers should do the writing, using the SMEs as consultants.
This fits my prejudice that it's hard to write well about something you're
really close to, particularly if you're not a writer to begin with. But a
sample size of one test case isn't very compelling to me, and my experience
is that SMEs are easier to train than most of us think.

<<What kinds of hybrid scenarios make sense?>>

The most obvious one is to get your writer and the SME to work together to
develop a comprehensive outline, since the SME should be better than the
writer at knowing what's important. (That's why they're called "experts".
<g>) The next option to consider is that some of your SMEs can undoubtedly
be trained to write decent first drafts, perhaps in point form to save time,
and this resource may be helpful when you're busy with other work. This
requires a good knowledge of the skills of the SMEs plus willingness to work
with them to figure out how you can share the work and minimize everyone's
workload.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

"Quebits took the art of manual writing to such extremes [that] the first
human scholars who'd tried to decipher their written language had spent a
lifetime working through what they hoped would be a definitive piece of
Quebit culture. No one was quite ready to say it wasn't, but the huge
ancient text had proved to be a manual for installing a sewage system within
a city."--Julie Czerneda, "Changing Vision"

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