It’s always a good idea to solicit feedback from others: other technical writers, the supervisor who asked for the communication, or even a general reader who has good writing ability. Even if you don’t have a lot of time, a quick read and response from another person can help you finalize a document and may uncover an important, necessary edit.
Writer’s Role in Soliciting Feedback
As a writer, you have more of a role in soliciting feedback than just asking someone to read or review. Provide brief background stating your purpose, audience, and writing situation. And ask questions about specific aspects of the document on which you would like feedback. For example:
- Does my explanation make sense to you?
- Would it make sense to our least technical customers?
- In general, is my writing style too technical? (I may have mimicked too much of the engineers’ specifications.)
- Do the headings clearly indicate each section’s content? (I had trouble phrasing some of these.)
- Are the screen shots clear enough? (I may have been trying to get get too much detail in some of them.)
Reader’s Role in Providing Feedback
First of all, know that peer reviewing is a good way to become a better writer because it provides experience in looking analytically at writing. When you peer review another writer’s work, you evaluate it, criticize it, suggest improvements, and then communicate your thoughts to the writer. Review and feedback are not confined to just catching grammar, spelling, or punctuation errors; those are important, but not the only things about which a reviewer should provide feedback.
When you review a document to provide feedback, consider the following:
- Interest level – do you engage in the reading?
- Appropriateness of content to the intended audience, purpose, and type of communication
- Clarity of content
- Logical organization
- Coherence – does all information obviously work together around one purpose?
- Clear title, introduction, and conclusion
- Clear headings; headings accurately indicate the content in their sections
- Appropriate, clear graphics; graphics when needed to enhance explanations
- Clear, easy-to-follow layout
- Appropriateness of language to the intended audience, purpose, and type of communication
- Appropriate sentence style and tone
Guidelines & Strategies for Offering Feedback
- Base your feedback on accepted guidelines, concepts, principles, and rules. It’s not enough to tell a writer that two paragraphs ought to be switched. State a reason why, e.g., more general, introductory information should come first.
- Explain the problems you find fully. Don’t just say a document “seems disorganized.” Explain what is disorganized about it. Use specific details presented in a positive way to demonstrate your case. For example, “There seem to be three different paragraphs that all deal with operating system errors; could those paragraphs effectively be grouped together under that heading?”
- Avoid rewriting the draft that you are reviewing. In your efforts to suggest improvements and corrections, don’t go overboard and rewrite the draft yourself. Doing so steals from the original writer the opportunity to learn and improve as a writer.
- Categorize comments according to type of problem or error—content, organization, grammar and usage, etc.
- Indicate the relative importance of the groups of comments, e.g., which suggestions would be “nice” to incorporate and which ones are critical to the document’s success.
- Ask questions if you’re uncertain about what the writer really meant to state or imply. Your questions can point out places in which a document may be unclear to an audience.
- A sandwich approach often works: say something positive first, move into the items that need editing, and then end on another positive note.
