How to Do a Quality Review for Your Writing

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I am an IT Quality Assurance and Governance Manager by day, and that means I read, review, and write a lot of policies and procedures. My team is also responsible for reporting on progress and enforcing policy. I spent most of last week conducting quality reviews on a variety of IT documents. There are certain standards that need to be followed before the work is accepted. Self-editing is a lot like a quality review. Here are some items that you need to check as you review your work and prepare it for publication.

  1. Start off with your basic spell check to catch obvious typos. Just be careful, some of the grammar suggestions are not correct.
  2. Check the spelling of any brand names you use. Make sure they are spelled and capitalized correctly. (e.g. Post-it Notes, BAND-AID, etc.) Also make sure that you're not using a brand name to refer to a generic item.
  3. Make sure that your word use is consistent with capitalization and hyphenation (e.g. database or data base; tshirt, Tshirt, or T-shirt).
  4. Check your headers and footers. Is all of your contact information correct?
  5. If you manually typed the chapter numbers, go through each and make sure you didn't skip or duplicate any.
  6. Check all of your names and place names - especially if you made changes during editing. My friend renamed a character, but when it went through critique group, she found that she hadn't changed all of the instances. We were all wondering who this new character was who just appeared out of nowhere.
  7. Be consistent with your use of numbers. Do you write them out or use digits? If you're using digits, you shouldn't start a sentence with it; write out the word.
  8. Look for overused words. I have a bunch that I tend to repeat (and repeat). I have a list, and I add to it when I find more culprits. Use your search/replace to locate and eradicate them. My big offenders are "just" and "that."
  9. Change the view on your word processer to a small percentage (e.g. 25%) so that you can see a lot of pages at once. Look at the lengths of your chapters. Are they balanced? Sometimes, I find I have a bunch of short chapters and then a series of really long ones. If possible, try to even these out.
  10. If you don't have a writing partner, critique group, or beta readers, you should invest the time and find one that works for you. Real peer reviews are invaluable. I am part of a mystery critique group, and the advice and support are wonderful.