Reviewer Comments: What Do I Do Now?

In the previous article, I discussed reviewing your manual prototype. The prototype, you will recall, is one representative section of the manual in final form. Now that you have the reviewer’s comments, what do you do?

Your next steps will depend on whether you are an employee or a contract writer and whether your company or client already has documentation guidelines, such as a style guide for a brief description of a style guide). No matter what the situation, you should read all of the comments with an open mind. Your reviewers may have very good ideas that will improve the manual.

You may need to follow up with one or more reviewers to obtain clarification. You may also have to explain to a reviewer why you organized or wrote something the way you did. After understanding your reasoning, the reviewer may decide that no change is needed.

You may also need to negotiate some changes. By negotiate I mean that you discuss the change in detail with the reviewer with the goal of arriving at a solution that is agreeable to you (assuming that the reviewer’s proposed solution was not) and that resolves the reviewer’s concern.

If you are a contract writer, you should work closely with your primary contact as you decide which comments to incorporate and which to bypass. The primary contact should be able to help you in resolving conflicts between a reviewer’s comments and what is best for the manual.

If your company or your client has a style guide, use it. The style guide may also help to resolve conflicts. If a reviewer wants you to do something that is contrary to the style guide, you have clear support for not using the comments.

You should incorporate the agreed-upon changes into the prototype and keep it nearby. You will refer to the prototype as you write the rest of the manual.

Unless you already have all of the information you need, your next step in writing the manual is to gather additional information. You have your approved outline and prototype, so you know what information you need to include in the manual.

As you developed the outline, you probably gathered a variety of documents about the product you are describing. You probably also met with subject matter experts to learn more about the product’s features, functions, and benefits. You may need to meet with those subject matter experts again to gather more detailed information.

In the next article, I’ll discuss tips for gathering the information you need to write your manual.

A style guide is a document that describes the "rules" for creating specific types of documents. Some companies have style guides that cover everything from a short memo to a lengthy manual. Other style guides only cover longer types of documents. The rules in the style guide may include page formatting, typeface style and size, terms to use, and basic writing and grammar guidelines. Style guides vary from company to company. The primary purpose of a style guide is to ensure consistency of the look and writing style of documents written by different authors.