Review processes should provide the opportunity for authors of key sections to read each others’ contributions.
This helps to ensure a balance between consistency and too much repetition. It also highlights, at an early stage, glaring differences in writing style or “voice”.
Don’t Be Arrogant About Your Writing Skills
That said, I’ll take the opportunity to make known that I’m not an advocate of the standard-thinking “bronze, silver and gold” review concept (i.e. the forum in which any shared reading normally takes place).
Why?
Because it creates the impression and the expectation that only three major rounds of review are necessary. That’s errant, in my experience.
I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.
James A. Michener (1907-1997), Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author of 40 books)
If some of the world’s most famous authors subject their writing to numerous rounds of re-writing and editing, why would those who don’t write for a day job, think three reviews are sufficient . . . and sufficient even in the face of a big-ticket, or even genuinely mission-critical, bid?
It’s “under-kill” and it’s foolhardy.
But Back to Consistency . . .
But back to my opening point i.e. the necessity to appraise each key section’s contributing author of every other key section contributing author’s content.
As well as balancing consistency with the avoidance of blatant repetition, shared readings also provide the opportunity to evaluate – from a variety of viewpoints – whether or not each section author has optimised his or her utilisation of the strategy blueprint.
