Cheat Sheet: Professional Document Writing
Effective ways to create, edit, and overhaul documents for your job
Professional documents are critically important at work. They list out procedures, provide structure and clarity to people reading them, are a form of liability protection, and more. These documents are vital for creating the standards your organization has.
However, there is one issue: these documents can be painfully dull and boring to read. I know this because I have forced myself to read any policy manual at jobs that I’ve had, if there were any. Believe me, some of them were painfully dull. While sports, and life, were on pause during the early days of the Covid pandemic, a colleague and I began editing and updating our university’s policies & procedures manual. I’ve also done this at many other places that I’ve worked; I’ve also developed policy manuals. I realize that this isn’t something that everyone is going to want to do or have time to do. Regardless, these are all things we need to have in the forefront of our mind when interacting with these important documents.
Here are some of my tips and tricks for working with these documents.
Full disclosure: I’m the son of a librarian and my sister is an English major. I grew up around wordsmiths and I was able to absorb their brilliance.
When you’re editing an existing document, make a duplicate new copy and edit that one.
This may seem obvious, but it’s worth being captain of the obvious here. If you’re editing an important work document, you really shouldn’t mess with the existing one. Editing a duplicate will protect you because if you screw things up or delete a lot by accident, you always have the original copy. This also gives you something to reference if you’re doing major formatting or reordering of the original copy.
Take the time to edit the text with a fine-tooth comb.
The font should be consistent, spacing should be consistent, margins should be consistent, font size and color should be consistent, bullet or number list indentations should be consistent, etc. I worked on a policy manual that had 3 different fonts, several formatting styles, and had page numbers on some of, but not all, the pages throughout the document.
Brief aside, this document also would sometimes use the term “healthcare” department/staff and other times used the term “health care” department/staff, with no clear reason for the different spelling choice. Now, I don’t know if it matters if one writes health care staff or writes healthcare staff, but in a professional policy manual, the spelling ought to be consistent.
It takes time and patience to read through and correct all these formatting items, but it is important. It’s annoying and makes you go cross-eyed, but it really should get done.Tips
The ruler function on Microsoft word will be your friend here
Find and replace is so helpful
Headers and footers are your friend, but be careful with them
Times new roman or arial font styles are always a good option.
Less is more.
It’s easy to over explain or write long winded sentences. If you follow the KISS (keep it simple stupid) it will always point you in the right direction. An easy test is having someone who knows nothing about where you work or what you do read a part of the document. If they can understand what it means, great. It’s important to have the question of “what should the reader be getting out of this?” in the forefront of your mind. That points your writing in a direction. Another helpful thing to do here is ask: “can I say this in half the amount of words and still get my point across?” If the answer is yes, then rewrite. I can’t decide if I dislike editing these documents more than I dislike reading them, if you can concisely get your point across with less fluff, your reader will thank you for it.
When in doubt: read it out loud, that cleans writing up very efficiently.
Emergency action plans and other related documents need to be simpler.
Building from my last point, we don’t want any documents related to emergency procedures to be more complicated. As an athletic trainer, it’s easy to write these documents with technical jargon and with an assumption that another athletic trainer or healthcare professional will know what to do. These documents should be so simple and direct that the reader who has no training on medical emergencies ought to be able to read the document and at least understand these two things: what needs to happen and what are things that I can do to help in this situation? In better words: these should be short and sweet and ideally fit on 1 page.
Use pictures/maps: people should understand traffic flow and important access points.
Think about someone you know who you may consider to be unprepared for an emergency and write with them in mind. This will help you write simply and concisely. Remember, this document is for anyone to be able to read and execute on, regardless of their medical training or emergency preparedness.
Use templates and charts.
There are ways to create base templates with different word processers, I don’t know how to do that. But, you can simply make a header document and then ‘save as’ different protocols off of that.
If you’re creating a large body of technical information like a staff directory or table of contents, etc use a chart. The columns function is nice, but I don’t have the patience for that. A simple grid chart does the job great. You can put blank boarders on it, so it looks neat.
Your writing should be engaging.
Make no mistake, this isn’t Harry Potter or a Coleen Hoover novel that ‘you aren’t going to want to put down.’ But you should at least write so the reader can follow along and not disengage or completely stop reading the document.
Procedures should be lists not paragraphs.
If you’re describing a step by step procedure, you should make it a bullet list. Less is more. Bullet lists work for training people quickly and it reinforces “a then b then c” and so on. I learn faster from lists, I would guess others do too.
This doesn’t just apply to procedures, if you can list something vs. write it out it can organize the reader’s perception easier so they don’t have to visualize the information in their head, you did it for them.
Who, what, when, and how.
If you have an official policy and procedure manual this is the order you should have things listed in, more or less.
Staff and important contacts
Day-to-day procedures (opening, closing, etc)
Standard procedures (how to do ~fill in the blank~ procedures)
Important polices (concussion policies, staff conduct policies, etc)
Appendix or references
Have the date of final edits somewhere in the policy: the cover page is a convenient place for this
Consult with HR, legal, or any other stakeholders necessary.
These documents are liability protection for staff and the institution you work at. Use your resources to protect yourself, your staff, and your institution.
PDFs > Word documents.
Final drafts are better in PDFs.
If you’re rewriting an existing policy or writing a completely new policy, I wish you luck. It’s time consuming, but very important. If you currently are undergoing this process and would like some help or guidance, feel free to contact me, I’d be happy to help you.
