Reviewing engineering documents

Summary

This course has been designed to support managers and technical experts who are responsible for delivering reports through their direct reports and colleagues.

Do you find yourself re-writing sections of other people’s work? Does it take longer than it should to sign-off a report? Are you given poor quality documents to review? Does the first draft submitted to you bear little resemblance to what you had expected? If you can answer ‘yes’ to any of these questions, this course is for you.

Reviewing, approving and signing-off the writing of others is a skill in itself. Doing it efficiently whilst still allowing the author to retain their ownership and style, takes this skill to another level. The skills you will learn on this course will enable you to improve the final quality and consistency of the work produced within your department, whilst significantly reducing the time you need to spend on the reviewing task.

This practical course is designed to help anyone who reviews, approves or signs-off technical documents. It aims to present the key principles to make the task as time efficient and customer focussed as possible. It will take you through the tools and techniques that will help you improve the quality and readability of the documents, increasing the impact and standardisation of the written work. Attendees will learn simple techniques to encourage identification and sharing of ‘best practice’ so that you can make your whole team more productive.

Who should attend?

Anyone who is responsible for reviewing, compiling, proof reading, editing, approving or publishing technical documents.

How will I benefit?

After the course you will be able to:

• Provide an accurate brief so that the author knows what is expected from their document.
• Give constructive feedback to enable continuous improvement of the writing of your team.
• Understand the role of the reviewer and ensure that documents for your attention are of a suitable standard for you to carry out that role satisfactorily.
• Save time so that you can efficiently approve, review, check and sign-off reports.
• Have a consistent document structure and writing style across your team/department.
• Easily enable standardisation of layout and share best practice.
• Use Microsoft Word to help consistency and clarity in the work.
• Reference correctly and consistently.
• Understand the broad outlines of copyright and how to ensure the work complies.

Key topics

• Producing clear document specifications.
• The role of the reviewer/approver.

• Ensuring that technical documents arrive in a suitable form ready for review.

• The importance of consistency in documents including templates, structure, referencing, style.

• What reviewers should consider and what they should not.

• Giving constructive criticism to the author in a clear and easily implemented way to allow future improvements.

• Editing the document to improve clarity.

• Some common grammar and style errors and how to do it right.

• Referencing – why, how and different international standards.
• Using Microsoft Word efficiently.

Meet our trainers

These trainers regularly teach Reviewing engineering documents.