Re: Everybody's a Reviewer

["Thiessen, Christopher E" <Christopher -dot- E -dot- Thiessen -at- CDEV -dot- COM>]

Looks like corporate politics - but my suggestion to the unfortunate is to
accept this as an existential exercise: play the game and distribute the
copies, and as "reviews" come in identify them as either grammatical or
technical. (This whole exercise presupposes there is absolutely no deadline
for printing.) Then, based on the volume of corrections (since some of these
corrections are going to contradict themselves), determine the next round of
reviews (and of course the entire group has to look at the corrected version
again), and schedule printing for late 1997. It looks like an enlightening
next quarter or so.
 ----------
From: Eric J. Ray
To: Technical Writers List; for al
Subject: FW: Everybody's a Reviewer
Date: Monday, October 14, 1996 4:15PM

Posted anonymously, on request. It's legit. Eric

________________________________________________

Before I get totally hysterical, maybe somebody has been in my situation...

I have just finished writing a manual which is quite good. It's been through
three reviews with the SMEs and all their corrections have been entered.
It's also been edited by two technical writers (that's all we have). Now
that
I am all ready to go to press, the approval board (my boss) has come up with
a creative idea: The entire R&D and QA staff has to read the entire book.
I have never heard of this kind of procedure before and it sounds to me like
the world's biggest nightmare, but my boss refuses to budge. Can anybody
give me some good arguments why this shouldn't happen. When I noted
that this is an expensive use of the programmers' time, he said, "You just
let
me worry about that."

Help...

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******************************************************
Eric J. Ray                            ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com
TECHWR-L Listowner