The Cost of a Comma

I was introduced to the idea of quality in manufacturing when I was studying for my MBA. This was the era of Malcolm Baldridge, Kanban, and Statistical Process Control. Now it is Six Sigma and LEAN manufacturing not to mention many other terms. When I came out of college you “QCed” processes (quality control processes). Now you “QA processes (quality assure processes). Whatever terminology you use, the intent is the same “zero defects” (terminology which pre-dates all these other terms).

 

We can never achieve zero defects, but we can certainly minimize them. A 2% chance of brakes failing on a car doesn’t sound too horrible until you quantify it. If you sell 1 million cars, then 2% means there is the potential for the brakes to fail in 20,000 cars. If you purchased the defective car, the results could be devastating. It is clear that 2% is much too high, but how does this apply to the world of technical documentation? What is the cost of that missing or misplaced comma?

 

I ask this question, because as a technical writer and instructional designer, I have often seen the review process run amok. You send a document for review. It comes back marked up. You send it out again. The reviewer revises it again. You send it out again, more revisions. The amount gets smaller and smaller, but there is always another revision. You could say the revisions approach infinity. 

When do you say stop! Enough is enough! What happens if a grammatical error or punctuation mark is missed?

 

The magazine Tails printed on its cover:

“Rachel Ray finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog.”

 

I feel confident that Rachel does not practice cannibalism or eat her dogs (at least I hope so). Let’s try this again with the right punctuation:

“Rachel Ray finds inspiration in cooking, her family, and her dog.”

What a relief!

 

Here is another one that I remember from college. I would love to attribute it to the original author, but I cannot remember which book it came from:

Dear John:

I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we’re apart. I can be forever happy. Will you let me be yours?

Gloria

 

Now let’s put the punctuation in a different place.

Dear John:
I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind, thoughtful people, who are not like you. Admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me. For other men, I yearn. For you, I have no feelings whatsoever. When we’re apart, I can be forever happy. Will you let me be?

Yours, Gloria

 

And according to Snopes this claim is true, “A misplaced comma deprived the U.S. government of an estimated $1 million in revenues.” I’ll leave you to explore that one yourself.

 

I have established that the comma, or any misuse of punctuation or grammar can have unintended consequences, but when you are writing for a living, the time spent on these corrections has a cost. I will use an e-learning example, but whether it is e-learning or technical documentation, corrections have a cost. 

 

First round

Mary is asked to create an e-learning lesson. Her first step is to take the material provided to her and draft a storyboard. This is essentially an outline that contains all the text used in the lesson, such as narration, on –screen text, graphic thumbnails or descriptions of the visual elements, and descriptions of interactive elements.

 

She then distributes this document to the reviewers, most likely subject matter experts (SMEs). She explains that it is very important for them to review the text and content carefully, since this will serve as the foundation for the lesson. It is much cheaper and easier to edit this document now, then it will be later when she begins producing the e-learning itself. She asks that the document is returned with mark-ups in one week.

 

There are three reviewers. Ted returns it very quickly with very little mark-up. Tom returns the document at the end of the one-week period. There are so many mark-ups that Mary can barely understand them. Amanda doesn’t return it at all. Mary hounds her for 2 weeks until her manager tells her to continue on, as there is not enough time in the schedule to wait.

 

Second round

Mary spends a week making all the revisions. She then starts laying out the narration, screen elements, and graphics. She creates the branches and feedback required using the e-learning software. Then she publishes the lesson in a document format for easier review and distribution. She spends several hours removing the extraneous details that the software generates to make the document easier to review by the SMEs. Mary sends this document to the same reviewers, again asking for a turnaround of 1 week.

 

This time Ted returns it after 2 or 3 days. He has changed all the wording, and says this is not what he expected at all. He does not like the graphics, and feels that the interactions are not appropriate, suggesting new ones.

 

Tom also returns it in 2 or 3 days and makes very little mark-up this time.

 

Amanda actually returns it this time at the end of this week. She is baffled as to where the content for the lesson came from. She feels they all need to meet to restructure the whole course.

 

More rounds

Mary finds herself holding a meeting, going back to the drawing board and starting with the storyboard again. The team decides that until everyone agrees on the storyboard, they should not move to the next step. There is a lot of haggling over wording. Tom and Amanda both feel they are excellent writers and Mary finds herself going through countless iterations fixing commas, periods, and wording. The project is now behind by two weeks.

 

What went wrong? Do all these iterations arguing over punctuation and wording add value to the project or prevent disasters? We know that misplaced punctuation can completely change a sentence, but once you are several rounds into edits, the message is probably fine. More likely, the reviewer’s need for perfectionism is the issue.

 

How do you keep costs in line, projects on track, and still turn out high-quality materials? I went through a similar (though a little less extreme) situation recently. The final e-learning had been through several rounds of review. We were now in the final stage of testing it for operation on the LMS. The LMS reviewer was sending me spreadsheets with 20 to 30 errors. At this stage, I would expect there to be very few errors, and that these errors would be of the navigational or operational type. Instead, they were errors about punctuation, wording, citations, font styles, and graphic alignment.

 

Did I do a terrible job? Not really. You must remember several other people had already reviewed this. If these errors were glaring (or even in need of fixing) they would have seen them (or so you hope). The real issue was that the reviewer did not understand her role in the QA process, and possibly the earlier reviewers also were not fully aware of their roles.

 

I don’t believe I was doing a sloppy job, although I am afraid that might be the image I conveyed when I expressed that the reviewer should not be correcting grammar at this stage. The real issue was over-zealousness. The reviewer wanted the product to be perfect, and did not understand how much this type of QA costs at the end of the process or the fact that these were not deal-breaker errors.

 

I spent several months working with my liaison at this company to develop robust QA procedures and checklists that identified each person’s role at each stage of the review process with the intent of improving and streamlining the process. Here are the bones of that collaboration:

 

Storyboard (draft): all major revisions should occur at this stage.

Wireframe (pre-published module):

• Minor edits occur here.

• Any edits to narration must be final at this stage.

• Review for layout and progression. 

 

Published:

• The only revisions to audio allowed at this point are due to errors by the voice-talent.
• All navigation works as expected.
• Links work, branching is logical.
• Feedback occurs when expected.
• Animations make sense and so on. 

 

LMS review:

• No edits should occur at this point; this stage is strictly operational.
• Does the course load properly, navigate properly, score correctly, record correctly? 

 

When you make sure each person understands his or her role in the review process and make sure they adhere to their roles by providing checklists they can use, you are well on your way to achieving high quality materials in a timely and cost-effective fashion.