Review processes should provide the opportunity for authors of key sections to read the content of their fellow contributing authors’ sections.
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”.
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.
If some of the world’s most competent authors, and history’s most famous, 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 business-critical, bid?
It’s “under-kill” and it’s foolhardy.
But back to my opening point: the necessity to appraise each key section’s contributing author of every other key section contributing author’s content.
As well as ensuring consistency but the avoidance of blatant repetition, this also provides 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.
This avoids the disconnect inherent in any section of the submission, the author of which has not allowed himself or herself to be adequately guided by this all-important central strategy document.
