The Quest for Quality

Just like the North American explorers seeking the elusive Northwest Passage, we technical communicators have been looking for a certain statistic that, if we were to find it and measure it, we could prove without a doubt that our work was of high quality and that would demonstrate, without question, the value of a technical communicator’s services to an employer.

We devised many approaches to assessing quality and demonstrating value began in the 1970s and 1980s. They include:

* Counting comments on drafts, hoping to establish a correlation between the number of review comments and the quality of communication products.
* Assessing conformance to requirements (Bandes, 1986). This is called the industrial definition of quality because it is the same approach used to assess the quality of manufactured parts, like circuit boards.
* Devising the U-metric, a list of 100-plus characteristics that are associated with the quality of communication products.