It has been some time since the last blog post. I am not taking time off from posts. Rather, my workload and travel schedule have created a hectic environment where I have found it difficult to carve out time to create and upload useful posts.
This post is an unabashed personal plug for an article I coauthored with my colleague Stephen Bernhardt. The paper: Missed Opportunities in theReview and Revision of Clinical Study Reports appears in the April issue of the Journal of Business and Technical Communication.
In the paper we look to further the understanding of review practices as applied to large and complex technical documentation. Specifically, the paper describes several case studies where we examined closely the review efforts of teams in the process of finalizing clinical study reports. Our title suggests we see considerable room for improvement of review practices.
We see our work as an extension of other studies of review practices in professional settings.
- Paradis, Dobrin, and Miller (1985) first established document review as a critical site of contentious interaction in a research and development environment (Exxon). These authors contrasted document review from the opposing perspectives of managers and employees, detailing the ways that individuals often worked without shared purpose or expectations, resulting in frustrating differences of perception, feelings of resentment, and the need to substantially rework documents during successive reviews.
- Van der Geest and van Gemert (1997) pinpointed a general sense of frustration with review processes in several Dutch companies, noting that “both writers and reviewers find reviewing the most cumbersome stage in the process of text production, given that many parties are involved in it and that it is loaded with different expectations” (p. 445).
- Henry (2000), working with data gathered by many interns at various professional sites, found that reviews were “fraught with second guessing” and required “interpretations of organizational culture to the ends of adequately and appropriately delivering discursive products” (p. 65).
- And several studies (Henry, 2000; Katz, 1998; Paradis et al., 1985) discuss the activity of “document cycling,” an activity in which documents pass through multiple and sometimes conflicting reviews, as various reviewers weigh in with commentary.
A theme throughout the literature is that document review frequently brings into play conflicting or competing purposes. In addition to improving a document, review sometimes functions to evaluate worker performance (Couture & Rymer, 1991) or to discipline individuals (Henry, 2000, p. 81). Thus, interpersonal dynamics are frequently in play. Katz (1998), in particular, highlighted how review processes can function positively as a way to socialize new workers, helping them learn how to both write and work successfully within the local culture. Henry (2000) shared this concern for how interns come to understand the ways that organizations perform work.
The position we take in this paper is that changing nonproductive, conditioned, inefficient practices is NOT an easy matter, or companies would have already done so. We suggest that recognizing nonproductive review practices and understanding the causes for such practices should be an object of focus for more organizations. We understand that collaborating to develop complex documents with sound arguments involves difficult cognitive and social practices. But if a company establishes the goal of producing quality documentation through efficient and effective review practices, it will find that it must do a lot of work to counter the ingrained tendencies of review teams to focus on low-level stylistic edits as opposed to high-level rhetorical concerns.
