Friday, October 31, 2008

Chapter 15 reading

Chapter 15 discusses ways to test your draft to recognize problems that your paper has that you may not have identified as being problematic. In doing this it will help produce the best outcome in your final paper. Testing your draft is similar to having someone review your draft except you are having multiple people read your draft in the eyes of the audience expected to actually read your paper. Once you know the feedback from what the book refers to as the "test readers" you will have some idea of how your audience will react to the paper. You will be able to notice what works and what does not work for your reading audience.

In order to make this practice work the best you must make sure that when choosing your testers they are actually people that "represent your target readers." Some ways that I can improve in this area is usually I only have one person review my draft and not always do they represent my target readers. This is something to pay more attention to. I also see how it is important to get feedback from more then 1 person. Multiple test readers means more feedback which in the end will create for a better final paper.

The main goal in using test readers is to figure out whether or not your writing is usable. the book mentions several tests that you can perform. Some that stick out to me are location tests which require the test reader to answer certain questions. This will help determine whether or not your titles and headlines are effective. The Understandability test is when you ask the reader to read paper and then ask questions regarding the paper to see how well the reader understands the paper.

This chapter provides some good ideas on how to determine how usable your paper is before you turn it in for that final grade or to your boss. In the case you are turning it in to your boss, on how this paper will make you look. Knowing these tools will be helpful for future work in class and on the job.

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