ENG 333 Communication for Science and Research

Jamie Larsen, Instructor

Document Revision & Cohesion

One of the biggest stumbling blocks with any collaborative writing project is to create a cohesive package. You do not want your readers to be distracted by multiple voices in a text. Learning how to conduct a quality review begins with learning a few useful stratgies. Before you begin the stage of quality assurance for a final draft, you should realize the common problems that can impede such a process:

• Expertise - Writers tend to know their subjects well, and they are therefore often not the best judge of the quality of a text. Peers, who can take on the role of a novice reader, can often provide better insights into how to improve a text.
• Time - Quality review takes time and revision is often the first thing to suffer when schedules slip. Be sure to include enough time for a thorough review.
• Cost - Review takes time away from other tasks, and in industry, human factors testing is expensive. However, companies realize that this cost is worthwhile since quality sells products (and gets the grade!).
• Ego - Often, thorough testing identifies more problems, and this can ruffle writer's feelings. Remember this maxim: The best a writer can hope for is enough talent to catch the obvious errors, and enough creativity to design good tests to catch the others.

The following strategies will help you polish your text, and create a cohesive sounding, and looking, document:

1. Check for accuracy - verify all quotes, page references, totals, etc.
2. Check for correctness - SPELL CHECK!
3. Check for format - consistency = effectiveness
   • Page through the document quickly and see if you can find at a glance the most important information on a page. Also, see if headings are prominent, important terms are highlighted, and figures and graphics are set apart from the text.
   • Make a list of the distinctive features (e.g., format of level one headings, format of subheadings, footers, etc.), and check for consistency.
4. Check for style - The reading level of a text should be equivalent throughout the document. If your executive summary is written at an 18th grade level, and the Introduction is written at a 9th grade level, then your document is not going to appear cohesive. The average high school graduate reads at a 6th grade level today, and most engineers read at a 15th to 16th grade level.

   The Fogg Index is an easy, and fast formula to use for those most important parts of your document (i.e., Executive Summary, Introduction, Conclusion).

   • Select a paragraph of text (100-200 words)
   • Count the number of long words (3 or more syllables)
   • Count the number of sentences
   • Calculate the grade level using this formula:

     0.4 (number of long words + (100/number of sentences))