June/July 2007

Volume 47, Number 6

President's Corner

by Deb Lockwood

Have you ever wanted to get another person’s opinion about a document, a training course, a template, or a style decision you’ve made? I sure have.

Although I work with a group of excellent technical communicators, sometimes it’s nice to get an outsider’s unbiased view of your work. And the gold standard, from my perspective, would be that the outsider would be a peer who spoke the same tech comm language as me. Sometime ago I discovered the perfect place to get just such a peer review…at the STC conference.

For a few years now I have been on the giving side of that equation by volunteering to review other people’s work. This year I was once again an evaluator during the Information Products Evaluation Workshop. The session description, quoted from the conference program, follows: “Sign up in advance for a 30-minute analysis of your information product by an expert. Your product will be evaluated for organization, style, layout, and use of graphics.”

For this session, requestors gave us the documents during the session and we evaluated and critiqued them while there. We had 30 minutes with each technical communicator to talk about the work they had brought with them. From my perspective, it was a terrific opportunity to see what other companies are producing and see how they are handling the same types of issues our company faces every day.

On Tuesday, for the first year I got to experience the flip side when I participated in the Expert Evaluation of Training mini-workshop. The description of that session follows: “This session provides expert evaluation and review of either classroom or eLearning courses. Participants are encouraged to pre-submit materials for evaluation by one of our expert instructional designers. Each participant will receive both written and verbal comments on their materials – comments aimed to provide strengths and opportunities for improvement. These comments cover all aspects of instructional design.”

I had submitted my training course materials ahead of time and the evaluator graciously reviewed those materials and came to our session with a written report outlining her observations and recommendations. During the actual session we went over her report and she was able to give me some background and clarifying context for her comments. She also directed me to two wonderful resources that will allow me to get a better grasp on adult learning theory.

These peer review sessions are an incredible value for conference attendees because, for no additional cost over the price of the conference, you can receive a professional peer review of your work. Wow! In fact, some people have said that the primary reason their employers reimburse part of their conference expenses is because of those reviews.