Cramp Your Style

Me: *to boss and another coworker, both with a combined 30 years at our company let alone our industry* “I drafted an FAQ for our clients in reference to this annual document. I think it will save us time in regards to requests for edits and explanations of content. It still needs some revisions, and maybe more content, but I wanted your opinions.”

Boss: “This is great. Add [additional information] and clean up a few of the more awkward wordings here and there. Also, make sure [Experienced Coworker] is able to chime in.”

Experienced Coworker: “I also agree it’s really good, but it needs some formatting and grammatical edits. Let me see it when you have all the content ready to go so I can get it corrected.”

(That request made me cautious, because I’ve seen her drafts and templates, but I complied. I got the revised document back and it was full of comma splices, uneven and unnecessary capitalization, inconsistent spacing between paragraphs and sections, and some layout changes that directly conflict with our style guide. I knew she’d never look at it again, honestly, so I just changed it all back and sent it off to our account representatives.)