Make Your Documents More Usable with QuikScan

QuikScan is an innovative set of formatting techniques designed to improve the comprehension, retention, and scannability of print and online documents. The presentation includes hands-on practice QuikScanning a short document and practical guidance for using QuikScan within your company or with your clients.

QuikScan is an editorial activity in which documents are modified so that readers can find and read the key ideas in documents they have not read fully or carefully. These modifications, called the “QuikScan document enhancements,” consist of various kinds of highlighting and within-document summaries. The primary focus is the use of documents as the basis of decision-making during meeting—and especially in situations like this:

A group of executives are participating in a meeting in which one agenda item is to make decisions on the basis of information provided in a 30-page report. Perhaps it is a draft version of a planning document, and the attendees must decide which parts of the plan to adopt and which to revise or reject. This report was distributed a week earlier. Very likely, many of the attendees have only skimmed the document and will be struggling to participate effectively. These individuals will be turning pages and scanning for key ideas as the discussion moves from topic to topic. The table of contents, the system of headings and preview statements help somewhat in this regard. Executive summaries and abstracts provide a general understanding of the document as a whole, but do little to enable readers to find particular information. The end result may well be an unproductive meeting and poor decision-making.

The basic idea behind QuikScan editing is to determine which ideas in a document are most important (superordinate) and to effectively apply the appropriate QuikScan enhancements. QuikScanning is not a cut-and-dried process. Effective QuikScanning requires considerable rhetorical skill and some training.

Quan Zhou (Joe) is the 2005 recipient of the Puget Sound Chapter's scholarship and is a 3^rd year Ph.D. student in the UW Department of Technical Communication. QuikScan is his dissertation topic. Zhou, who is from the People’s Republic of China, worked as a journalist and university press editor in both Chinese and English during his undergraduate years at the University of Wuhan. During the last three years Zhou has given a variety of conference presentations.

Dave Farkas is a Professor in the UW Department of Technical Communication and an STC Fellow. He’s written books and scholarly articles on online help, Web design, and other topics, and he’s spoken at many STC meetings. Dave is Quan Zhou’s dissertation advisor.