10th December 2011, 10:41 PM
I'm always fascinated when a curator goes out of their way to comment on the readability etc of a report, certainly suggests that a lot of the stuff they receive is below par - but then describing a load of postholes is probably not something they teach in English A-level.
The process here is in general that you write the thing, bung it at the management with some pics, it reappears an indeterminate time later with edits scribbled incomprehensibly in the margins (which are a whole separate learning-curve to decipher), or occasionally when you're first starting a personal managerial visitation to explain where you've gone horribly wrong, you do the edits, bang off a copy which gets perused by whoever is signing it off, get it back with a lot of mis-numbered paragraphs and formatting wierdness highlighted together with all the typos etc missed during all the previous stages, do lots of swearing, then a copy wings off as a draft to the client and the curator for comment, then the whole process again incorporating any comments from them (and taking the opportunity to spot all the typos etc missed by everyone previously), then issue the thing. Then about 3 years later whoever the land has subsequently been sold to comes back asking for the same eval, DBA or whatever again since the vendor neglected to pass on the original report, and you can surprise them by instantly emailing a copy by return (it's happened!). Luckily there seems to be a basic office culture of 'how do you spell this', 'can anyone think of a better/different way of saying this' etc, and people at all levels aren't shy about asking if anyone knows of parallels, sources of info and the like, so the end product goes out to a reasonably uniform and (hopefully) reasonably high standard. One advantage of a slightly more 'communal' approach like that is that lessons once learned tend to stay learned across the board, so hopefully the overall trajectory is upwards (eek, horrible phrase, sorry). Of course this relies on keep the same people for years....:face-thinks:
The process here is in general that you write the thing, bung it at the management with some pics, it reappears an indeterminate time later with edits scribbled incomprehensibly in the margins (which are a whole separate learning-curve to decipher), or occasionally when you're first starting a personal managerial visitation to explain where you've gone horribly wrong, you do the edits, bang off a copy which gets perused by whoever is signing it off, get it back with a lot of mis-numbered paragraphs and formatting wierdness highlighted together with all the typos etc missed during all the previous stages, do lots of swearing, then a copy wings off as a draft to the client and the curator for comment, then the whole process again incorporating any comments from them (and taking the opportunity to spot all the typos etc missed by everyone previously), then issue the thing. Then about 3 years later whoever the land has subsequently been sold to comes back asking for the same eval, DBA or whatever again since the vendor neglected to pass on the original report, and you can surprise them by instantly emailing a copy by return (it's happened!). Luckily there seems to be a basic office culture of 'how do you spell this', 'can anyone think of a better/different way of saying this' etc, and people at all levels aren't shy about asking if anyone knows of parallels, sources of info and the like, so the end product goes out to a reasonably uniform and (hopefully) reasonably high standard. One advantage of a slightly more 'communal' approach like that is that lessons once learned tend to stay learned across the board, so hopefully the overall trajectory is upwards (eek, horrible phrase, sorry). Of course this relies on keep the same people for years....:face-thinks: