Be a Reader to Be an Effective Reviewer

When I first started working at McCulley/Cuppan, Greg gave me the task of reviewing a clinical study report, not only as a way to gauge my reviewing skills, but as a starting place for lessons on judging document quality using the McCulley/Cuppan Document Standards. The first instruction he gave me was "Read before you edit."

Read before you edit.

Sounds simple, but when asked to review a document, most people start off by looking for mistakes. I remember sitting there, trying to pay attention to the document when all I could see was a misspelled word. All too often we see ourselves as that teacher of grade school with the red pen in hand, correcting verb tense and punctuation errors. We don't see the document at the meta-level so we miss the message and logic of the document.

Think about how you read a book, an article, or this blog. You read for meaning. If I leave a TyPo or too, you still understand that this post is about editing and reviewing documents. Now consider your habits when someone asks you to look at a document. Even if they say they want you to make sure that a paragraph makes logical sense, your eye probably catches all the typos and then proceeds to analyze the logic.

The truth is that inspection is easier than reviewing and is a quick way to show your contribution to a document. A way to say Look, see all these good edits I made? The reality is that lots of time is wasted, especially on first or second drafts, fixing nit-picky mistakes in grammar and punctuation on sentences that will be cut out of the document before the third draft. If you read a document (or section of a document) once all the way through, you will avoid re-reading sentences again and again just to get the meaning and avoid the need to revert your changes back to the original sentence.

During the last few months, I've been assessing a number of documents to judge reviewer performance as part of my work at McCulley/Cuppan. What I see all too often is that a reviewer will correct a sentence, changing a word or two, only to go back and change the sentence again within that same review session or in a subsequent draft. It is apparent many reviewers read to fix grammatical and stylistic errors. They are reading and analyzing each word individually versus parsing the sentence or paragraph for meaning. So a given word might seem to be the wrong choice at first glance, but if the reviewer were to read the entire paragraph, then the author's chosen word may be seen as appropriate. Style is a much overrated, overwrought topic during reviews. This is especially important when you read documents written by multiple people, where writing style and word usage is likely to vary widely.

But whether you are inspecting (editing for punctuation and grammar) or reviewing (assessing for purpose, logic, and content), reading a document in its entirety before making revisions places you closer to how the reader is going to engage with the document. In the assessments I have done, I have seen so many reviewers miss the forest because they were busily engaged inspecting branches on trees.