: What is the best way to collect comments on a draft document that is out for review by stakeholders? Draft technical documents can be reviewed by stakeholders. Stakeholders can be fellow practitioners,
Draft technical documents can be reviewed by stakeholders. Stakeholders can be fellow practitioners, industry specialists, senior managers, regulators, and so on.
The purpose of a stakeholder review is usually to receive feedback in the form of comments. The comments can be compiled by whoever is managing the documentation project and be used to improve the document prior to publishing.
Comments have traditionally been collected on a comments form that is supplied with a draft. Comments can also be returned as notes attached to a PDF.
These methods have a low barrier to entry and are useful for a wide-reaching review. But these methods are becoming obsolete as content is developed on the web.
What is the best modern practice to collect comments on a draft?
More posts by @Debbie451
: Have a concrete answer for yourself, and let it influence the entire story, but never actually explicitly state the answer Allow the reader to have their own theory, have something that gets
: This concerns me: Of course I could now come up with who did it and why If you're writing a mystery, you need to know the answer yourself even if your protagonist does not. Without
3 Comments
Sorted by latest first Latest Oldest Best
GitHub provides an inline comment feature which is pretty neat to facilitate reviews, as well as promote discussion among developers about the content and the comments.
As Chenmunka says, there are many systems that will provide a "place" to review the content. As for the actual process, I think that depends on where you content starts. Is it in MS Word? Then Chenmunka's suggestion is probably the lowest effort and best method. A slightly more "modern" alternative might be Google Docs.
If it's structured (XML/DITA) or web focused (Markdown), then you have a lot more tools to choose from. Many documentation systems come with review mechanisms. The way these mechanisms are implemented vary widely, so be sure to really test them before implementing one (I'm a huge fan of POCs).
Another option is using a staging site. If you're publishing to a knowledge base, wiki, or web CMS, most of them will have some feedback mechanisms built in. If you run a staging site you can use it as a place to review content before that content is published to the live version.
In the end, you need a central place to collect comments. Ideally, this place is very close to the source content, because that's going to be the primary determining factor in how much work it is for you, as the technical writer.
You can use a cloud document system such as Microsoft's Sharepoint or one of the similar competitors.
Publish your document there along with the comment form template and then you can either:
Allow reviewers to complete the form offline and upload their version
to the site
Allow reviewers to complete the form online
With the likes of Sharepoint you can restrict access to stop the reviewers from seeing each other's submissions. This is especially useful if the reviewers are from outside organisations. Or, if allowing online completion you may wish to have just one comment form which all can see.
This is more controllable than, say, putting an editable version of your document online and having reviewers add comments within it. You have a number of received, identifiable comments that can be referenced and audited against as necessary.
Terms of Use Privacy policy Contact About Cancellation policy © selfpublishingguru.com2024 All Rights reserved.