The Red Slide

During my analyst days, once we finished a report we would submit its printout to the project lead for review.

The lead would, in a classic teacher style, review the printed version with a red ink pen. We would dread the amount of rework that we were likely to get. For some reason what bothered us more was not the comment on missing a piece of analysis or better presenting the recommendation, but the sheer number of red marks on the report. The latter was a result of language edits, the majority of which were stylistic changes rather than grammatical errors.

When I started leading studies, for the first few times, I saw myself doing exactly the same. Majority of the comments I was putting in were for language edits rather than improving the quality of analysis. Needless to say, the stylistic language edits made the team feel a bit aggrieved who had burnt the midnight oil on the reports.

On reflection I realized three things
1. What gets seen (the red ink) more, gets noticed more
2. It's important to carve out time for what’s important (analysis); I started reviewing the report 2 times 1st for quality of analysis and the other time for grammatical correctness
3. We need to let our teams make their own stylistic choices