You seem to have a lot of emotion invested in making your product perfect the first time. Stop it, that’s ego talking. You’re efforts are by design part of a process, where the final product has many hands involved. You should still strive for your perfection, but understand that others are going to strive for their perfection on top of that.
I feel your pain, I write tons of tech documents that have to go through boards, peer reviews, etc.
What I’ve felt most useful is to have reviewers clearly categorize their feedback as follows:
- Comment / Info only
- Recommendation, but not required
- Requirement
If a requirement, the reviewer must also provide a clear cite/reason. E.g., ‘conflict with document X’, ‘grammar’, ‘Style uniformity with document Y’
This cuts way down on territorial egos, old-timer entrenchment, personal biases, etc. and really frees up people to work to their role and expertise in a fact-based environment without getting the ‘new kid’ slam down.
When you write, you like everything “just so”, right? You just have a sense of when a sentence is perfect?
They have that, too. But their “just so” is different than yours. Just like Hemingway and Tolkien will write the same thing differently. They aren’t trying to tear apart your work, they are just trying to get the document to the point that feels right to them. It may not be your preferred style, but that’s part of the territory of being a technical writer. I’d really strive to take it less personally.
As for the rest, the question that I would ask is “What makes my boss look good?” That’s what it all boils down to. If your ideas would make your boss look good, float them with him/her. But if they aren’t relevant or would upset your boss’s boss, I’d let them be and try to get to a place where you’ll have more influence.
For the type of issue you’ve highlighted, I would turn the work back on the reviewer and ask them to suggest a rewrite that more clearly conveys the proper meaning. The worse they can say is no. Doing this allows you accept their input without spinning your wheels on something too petty or subjective for you to correct without guessing.
It also creates a negative feedback loop that might keep trivialities to a minimum. It’s easy to review a document and find a million problems with it, but if you’re asked to provide solutions to those problems, that’s work. Old stodgy types don’t really want to work, they just want to look like they are.
I initially wrote a bunch of things in my earlier reply explaining exactly this - that they are as useless as a one legged man in an ass kicking contest. They’re not there to help you do a better job or make the result better. They are there doing their job - trying to feel like they serve a useful purpose (hint: they don’t).
If you gave them fucking Hemingway, they’d tear you a new one because the sentences are too short and choppy.
In other words, what Shodan said. Give the vultures what they want and get on with your life.
This. And pretty much only this.
Nobody else at this company give a flying f*** about work quality. Your many posts have made that clear. They have arrived at a place where they play a “fun” little game with each other all day and receive paychecks.
You need to either gladly and willingly join in their game, or get your paycheck elsewhere.
The only person with a goal of a better work product is you. They don’t want good quality. They want lack of change. That’s the only thing that will make the review board happy.
So you can continue to be the good little soldier who’s sent out across no man’s land every week to be blasted by their concentrated machine gun fire. Every week is a guaranteed suicide mission and nothing more. You know it. Your so-called manager knows it. Your actual boss knows it.
The manager & boss *might *be hoping a miracle will occur every now and then and you’ll make some progress despite all. Regardless of what it costs you in lost sanity and gained weight and ulcers.
Or maybe they truly don’t care either. They’re resignedly signing your suicide mission orders every week since it’s easier for them to say “Go JC!” than “I (boss person) will actually work to change the entrenched dynamic”.
You are embedded in a truly sick corporate culture and the only possible avenue for improvement is another job at another corporation.
I’ve been sorta where you are, where some of the upsides were really pretty good and the downsides seemed *at first *like such crazy logjams that just a little leverage would quickly sweep them away in the name of a better product, lower costs, improved profits, and all the other Holy Grails of business.
It was only later that I realized the logjams weren’t random. They were carefully constructed edifices that existed as a deliberate conscious choice of the many crazy worthless people who worked there and the many crazy worthless ways they had of “working”. All this exists with the *de facto * (if not deliberate) connivance of the entire management chain to the very tippy top.
You will no more break that logjam than you’ll pick up and carry the physical building on your back. It pains me to read your threads. I’m having office worker PTSD flashbacks as I’m typing this.
Get a friggin’ clue Woman !!!
I mean that as helpfully and as concernedly for your welfare as I can be.
THREE YEARS?! I’m amazed you’ve put up with it for this long. Honestly, you can’t change the company culture, you can only change yourself. Either stop caring so much, or find a new job elsewhere. I know you don’t want to leave (job hunting is a pain in the ass), but really, nothing’s going to change.
DH and I have both left companies with bad culture fits - stop stressing and just move on. It’ll be easier for everyone.
As others have intimated this is part of a larger game and unless you are willing to play by the institutional rules you are just wasting breath. I have to ask though if you’ve been doing this for three years I would think you’d would have a fairly solid grasp of the processes being described and the technical writing conventions of the industry by now.
If I am reading you correctly, you have direct user input about the quality of your documents. Was this done by survey or collected anecdotally? If you have specifics on what the CUSTOMER wants to see changed, you can use that information to set 1-3 goals for documents for the next year.
The first step I see for you is determining what the people who pay money for your stuff and need your documents want to see in your documents. Take the information, determine your goals, and get team buy in. For example, you learn that customers need step by step instructions with pictures. Your priority for the year is that all documentation will move to this format. Everyone buys in. Goal 2: you create a template, and get everyone to approve the template. From that point forward, you are working towards migrating everything into that template. Goal 3: seek customer feedback on the new format and make changes according to feedback.
Next step, provide reviewers with a concrete system they must use to provide feedback. GargoyleWB’s system is a good example. Again, everyone must agree to abide by the new system. This may take some shoving from your side. Keep everyone aligned by hammering on the facts that you all want a quality result and you must please your customers.
Step 3 - review your review board. Does everyone on it have to be there? Prune them as much as you possibly can.
Step 4 - consider breaking your review into a few cycles. The first cycle would be a smaller group of less senior people. Their job is to tell you what you got wrong, and make other helpful suggestions, using a system like Gargoyle’s. Revise accordingly and then submit to the more senior group. Senior people should be asked only for an approval sign off. No editing, re-writing, or digging into the weeds. You can sell this by telling senior people that you want to make sure you are using their precious time wisely. If needed, ask for the names of less senior people who can do that first scrub/sanity check for you. Hopefully the result of splitting the review is that the senior folks will spend less time wordsmithing your work, and can restrict themselves to a quick quality check sign off.
The reality is that group reviews of written work (or even artistic work) are painful, and create extra work for everyone. People should not be trying to re-write your words, but instead restricting themselves to factual errors, or calling you out on items that go against your main goals (which you have aligned to customer input). Group editing, IME, is just a disaster. It’s the nature of the beast. Do all that you can to set up the process so that group editing is held to a minimum.
It sounds like you will need to drive a lot of this, assuming a system like this makes sense. Get your manager’s support, but be prepared to do a lot of the selling and enforcement of the new system yourself.
I think it’s do-able. You’re meeting customer needs - win! You’re saving time by using the right internal resources - win! You’re going to include a feedback cycle for continued improvements - win! Be positive and push; hopefully good things will happen.
Three years? I thought this was just a few months -
But, my question is what do they do to each other?
I’m assuming that a) the members of the review board occasionally write or edit things and that b) they too have to go before a review board.
Do they just rubberstamp each other’s work or are they equally as nitpicky/critical with senior writers as well? If the latter, what happens next (does that person just make an edit, do they ignore the feedback, or do they send it for another round of reviewing)?
Also, do you know if this group has been bitten before? One thing that can make a team risk averse is when something went very, very badly and now they’re trying to overcompensate for it.
**Sunny Daze **has provided a very mature blueprint for what must happen for this process to operate as you want and as any non-insane functional business unit would want.
If your manager jumps on implementing this proposal in it’s entirety, AND he/she promptly and obviously pushes it far enough up the food chain to the person whose position has the authority to get it implemented in its entirety, AND that person jumps on making it happen and follows up until it really is in fact implemented, THEN you have the barest beginnings of a new world where you can do good work that leads to real results.
You have nothing to lose by trying step 1. I predict your manager will give you some approving noises in response and make zero further effort. Zero.
At which point you have your answer: It’ll be pointless suicide missions weekly until you quit or go insane. Your move.
For 25 years I did marketing communications that were intended to sell amazingly complicated things to ordinary people. Because the things were so complicated, I often worked with engineers, chemists, mathematicians and others for whom any deviance from precision absolutely unacceptable.
If I wrote (in trying to communicate with Joe Ordinary Person) that a new widget had a failure rate of less than one in ten million, someone in the review process would ALWAYS change it to <0.0000035 when used at temperatures between -30C and =175C in a use cycle not to exceed 78% active 22% standby during each 24-hour period.
I’d respond that those changes were “small print stuff” and not relevant to marketing communications and they’d look at me with blank faces. To them, there was no such thing as small print. Every single detail was equally important to them and every single detail had to be spelled out to the last decimal point.
Then the marketing side would get on me for making the copy too long and technical.
Eventually I came to the realization that my job was not to write the best I possibly could, but to hit that golden spot where everyone could be reasonably happy with the end product.
And if that meant changing “the wind blows the clouds” to “the clouds are blown by the wind” because the company’s wind authority insisted the wind isn’t capable of deliberately choosing to blow the clouds, I should simply point out (once) that active voice doesn’t imply deliberateness, and then shut the hell up about it.
“move around from” (means they are moving away from winds?) ambiguous. –> “move around due to”, or some other phrase that clearly shows cause and effect.
“sunshine” –> sunlight or visible light
“a person” –> the amount of light visible… (Or is the person’s perspecive really important?)
“on the ground” –> is where they are standing important? What if they are swimming, will they still see light?
“may change” –> will change.
Some food for thought.
For those who have pointed out in various ways that different people can put a different interpretation on any writing, I know that’s true. I was just getting the feeling from the constant “beat downs” that my interpretation was always wrong and theirs is always right. I don’t mean that to sound petulant, it’s just that when you’re always corrected even on the smallest thing it can start to feel … well, you know.
But some of you have pointed out that this is a team effort, and my definition of “quality” should be what the team puts out, not just what I put out. I think this is the crux of the problem. See, I have a background in software engineering. For more than 20 years I strove to put out quality code that worked without bugs. It was extremely important to write code that worked correctly the first time - meaning before it was put into production. “Do it right the first time.” That was my definition of quality work. But now I’m not an engineer anymore.
I talked with my manager about this a little yesterday and she clarified it for me pretty well. When you’re a manager, you don’t have any daily or weekly metrics to measure yourself on for quality. Doing a good job is entirely enabling the team to accomplish things. Even though I’m not a manager, I happen to be working on a team that’s extremely collaborative so this different standard of work quality also applies here. I need to stop measuring myself by an ability to write correctly the first time. My actual quality metric is to bring things to the group for discussion and clarification and accept criticism and rework with a smile. It’s going to take me some time to internalize that because it’s so different from my natural instincts.
I mean, I can take constructive criticism. But I need to embed it into a new personal quality metric. Something like this:
Did I bring something to the review board? yes/no
Did the review board have changes? yes/no
Did I make the requested changes cheerfully? yes/no
If all the answers were yes, then I’ve accomplished high quality work. Even if we iterated through that ten times for one document!
Thank you for this long post which was fantastic! My manager sees that our documentation quality is crappy and that we have some process issues like the organizational risk aversion. She’s asked me to do some interviews with people to suss that out and get some metrics on it. I started with interviews with internal people who use our documentation, internal engineering teams. I’m done with that and will review it with my team next month. I’ll do the same with key people from our external customer-base. All of this aligns perfectly with what you’ve described so we’ll follow the steps you’ve described.
Another interesting thing: I had my annual performance review yesterday and my boss again complimented me on my organizational skills and efficiency. I’m the most reliable and organized person in our whole division as far as she can see. She also commented that one thing that annoys her about most of our coworkers is that nobody is willing to take a risk try something outside the box - people tend not to lift a finger without a manager telling them to. But she’s noticed that I’m not as risk averse and willing to step up and propose things and do things without needing to be asked. She encouraged me to keep that non-risk averse attitude. I think if I keep that feedback in mind, with the customer survey interviews/analysis and network with her and the management team we may be able to gradually fix our documentation quality. So that’s something I can work on over the coming year, which is good because I’m extremely goal oriented.