Before any piece of mine goes live, someone reviews it.
That person has something I will never have again. A first read.
I lost mine the moment I finished the opening. By the final draft, I know every sentence before I reach it. I cannot tell you where the page stalls, because I know what comes next. I cannot tell you where it confuses, because I know what I meant.
The reviewer can. Only once.
Make the most of the read. Read it straight through to the end before you mark anything. The reader will not stop to annotate. When you start commenting in the first paragraph, you are reading a page that is different from the one the patient will read.
Then you write down what you felt. Where you drifted and where you went back a line. Where you thought I was reaching, and where you thought I was out of my mind because I used a fact that was hard to believe.
Describe the problem, let me fix it. “Change this to dedicated team” tells me you wanted something else. “I don’t believe this line” tells me what went wrong.
Vague notes are reactions without an address. “Be more expressive” is one, and it is usually right. Show me the line where you felt it.
Tell me which lines work. If I don’t know, I might cut them while I fix the rest.
The facts are yours. What the page should say, and to whom, is a two-person job. The sentences and the words stay mine. You check the dose, I check the verb.
Five people viewing a draft pulls the page towards the average of everyone’s worries. One set, always.
Be careful with the edits that make the page safer. Some are important, we are all scared of the regulator. But most hedges protect the institution and cost the reader. And the reader is the one deciding whether to book.