As I mentioned in a previous post, in our McCulley/Cuppan consulting work we find the prevalent standards used to determine the “success” of a document are largely driven by simple measures of accuracy and then a passel of “home brewed” concepts for characteristics of document that are largely idiosyncratic ideas about what matters to the reader.
When you have 10 people reviewing a document you will end up with at least 12 opinions about the quality of the document (incongruous number is intentional as sometimes you have a reviewer offering more than one opinion that often conflict) and ways of describing quality that are all over the map. People use different terms to describe quality and if they actually use the same term, then it is highly unlikely that they will use the same definition for the term. So the first problem faced in the review process is the vocabulary used to describe quality attributes in a document.
When writers and reviewers compose or edit text, they continually make decisions that concern semantics—the meaning their words convey—and syntax—the way the words are arranged and other structural elements of the document. However, writers and reviewers often base these decisions on assumptions that have not been tested with technically-oriented adult readers or complex, data-rich, technical documents. Worse yet is many assumptions have never been tested to determine validity. Thus, there are actions ordered by writers and reviewers that may not in fact have the expected effects on a readers' performance (we know this is certainly true with one very important reading audience for pharmaceutical and medical device companies—the regulatory agency, like FDA). So the second problem faced in the review process is to understand what document elements have a meaningful impact on semantics and where to focus time and attention on the syntactical elements of a document.
The first thing we do with a client is an examination of the terms used formally (such as in guidance documents) and informally (such as review comments in documents) to describe quality. This will give us a sense of how the organization views quality and how sophisticated they may be in trying to create a common platform that describes document quality for the organization.
The second thing we do is to provide clients with the terms McCulley/Cuppan uses to describe document quality and why the concepts underlying these terms are extremely important to help determine document communication quality. A very important consideration is that the terms should speak the user’s language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms.
We spend a huge amount of time talking about semantics. The term "semantics" refers to the study of how language conveys meaning. Using a broad definition of semantics, we help our clients learn how to focus on different features of a document. Features like word choice, the position of information in document sections, paragraphs and in documents as a whole, idea importance, and the visual representation of data.
Then we work with a client team to create and vet working definitions for the various quality standards.
We then roll out the standards in a workshop setting and show people how the standards are applied to the types of documents they have and will produce.
Originally published on our Knowledge Management blog
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