Printed Page 52-54

Revising

Revising is the process of looking again at your draft to see whether it works. After you revise, you will carry out two more steps—editing and proofreading—but at this point you want to focus on three large topics:

On the basis of a new look at your audience, purpose, and subject, you might decide that you need to make minor changes, such as adding one or two minor topics. Or you might decide that you need to completely rethink the document.

There are two major ways to revise: by yourself and with the assistance of others. If possible, use both ways.

STUDYING THE DRAFT BY YOURSELF

The first step in revising is to read and reread your document, looking for different things each time. For instance, you might read it once just to see whether the information you have presented is appropriate for the various audiences you have identified. You might read it another time to see whether each of your claims is supported by appropriate and sufficient evidence.

Start with the largest, most important problems first; then work on the smaller, less important ones. That way, you don’t waste time on awkward paragraphs you might eventually decide to delete. Begin by reviewing the document as a whole (for organization, development, and content), saving the sentence-level concerns (such as grammar, punctuation, and spelling) for later.

One effective way to review your whole document for coherence is to study the outline view of the document. Figure 3.1 shows how the outline view helps you see how the document is organized.

The writer has set the outline view to show the first two levels of his report. Using the outline view, it is easy to identify organization problems:

The results section should precede the conclusions and recommendations section.

In the results section, the second item—survey—seems to be different from the other two items, both of which seem to relate to the topic of the vehicles, not to the methods the writer used.

Appendix A and Appendix B should both be second-level headings.

After you have studied your draft to see if there are problems with its organization, study it to answer six additional questions:

SEEKING HELP FROM OTHERS

For technical documents, it is best to turn to two kinds of people for help. Subject-matter experts (SMEs) can help you determine whether your facts and explanations are accurate and appropriate. If, for instance, you are writing about fuel-cell automobiles, you could ask an automotive expert to review your document. Important documents are routinely reviewed by technical experts before being released to the public.

The second category of reviewers includes both actual users of your existing document and prospective users of the next version of the document. These people can help you see problems you or other knowledgeable readers don’t notice. For instance, a prospective user of a document on fuel-cell technologies might point out that she doesn’t understand what a fuel cell is because you haven’t defined the term.

How do you learn from SMEs and from users and prospective users? Here are a few techniques:

It is important to revise all drafts, but it is especially important to revise drafts of documents that will be read and used by people from other cultures. If your readers come from another culture, try to have your draft reviewed by someone from that culture. That reviewer can help you see whether you have made correct assumptions about how readers will react to your ideas and whether you have chosen appropriate kinds of evidence and design elements. As discussed in Chapter 11 and Chapter 12, people from other cultures might be surprised by some design elements used in reports, such as marginal comments.