Placing the camel`s hump: The review process

Conference · Tue Jul 28 04:00:00 EDT 1992

OSTI ID:10180376

Caruthers, M S

The old joke that a camel is a horse put together by a committee implies, of course, that anything done by committee is certain to be done badly. The miscommunication and lack of coordination endemic in committee work surely must result in a product that is unlovely and unsuitable for the task for which the committee intended it. And of all things under the sun, writing by committee surely is the least likely of all tasks to turn out well. I`m here to show you how writing by committee works--and works well--in my job. In my job as a technical editor at Argonne National Laboratory, I worked primarily in the Computing and Telecommunications Division (CTD), where I edited technical and scientific documents, newsletter articles, and marketing materials. Frequently, I did high-level edits, even generating some text of my own, in collaboration with computational scientists and technicians in my division. In this presentation, I call these people author-experts--i.e., people who were involved with the production of multi-author texts. I am going to take you step by step through the text writing and reviewing process that we employ to ensure error-free and usable texts for the Argonne audience: from secretary to nuclear physicist.

• Research Organization: Argonne National Lab., IL (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
• DOE Contract Number: W-31109-ENG-38
• OSTI ID: 10180376
• Report Number(s): ANL/CP--76977; CONF-9209142--8; ON: DE92040740
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
990300
COMMUNICATIONS
EVALUATION
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INFORMATION HANDLING
MODIFICATIONS
OPTIMIZATION