How do I check a draft against my original request?

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The volunteer handbook paragraph sounds welcoming, but it gives the wrong arrival time and forgets who receives incident reports. Should we polish its opening sentence? Not yet. Check the draft against the original request first. A short acceptance checklist can expose an unusable answer before you spend time making it sound better. Our handbook, requests, and mock drafts are fictional, so the comparison shows a method rather than a tool's measured performance.

Our request is for a paragraph between forty and sixty words, addressed to new adult volunteers. It must say to arrive at nine fifteen, sign in at the welcome desk, and report incidents to the shift coordinator. The request explicitly permits inviting volunteers to ask for guidance when unsure. The tone should be welcoming and direct, without calling volunteers careless. Those are four checks: length, required facts, no unsupported additions, and tone. We decide them before reading any candidate.

Here is our deliberately flawed mock paragraph. Welcome to the team. Arrive at nine thirty and head straight to your station. Our experienced volunteers never need reminders. Stay cheerful and follow the rules throughout your shift. It is twenty-eight words under our whitespace count, below the requested range. More importantly, it changes arrival, omits sign-in and incident reporting, and implies that needing guidance is a failure.

Score each criterion separately rather than giving a vague overall grade. Length fails. Required facts fail. The unsupported station instruction fails our no-additions rule. The reminder sentence fails the intended welcoming tone. Four failures do not become acceptable because one phrase sounds warm. Tone remains a human judgment.

Our corrected illustrative paragraph welcomes new volunteers, gives nine fifteen and the welcome desk, names the shift coordinator for incident reports, and invites questions. Read it against the same checklist, not a new easier standard. The corrected text has forty-eight words in our count, within the range. Every required fact is present. No station assignment is invented. The guidance sentence is authorized by our fictional request, not added merely because it seems helpful.

Only after these checks pass do we consider optional style edits. Perhaps we shorten a phrase or choose a warmer closing. Then recheck anything the edit could change: a time, a reporting contact, or the word limit. A checklist covers the criteria we actually wrote; it cannot discover every missing requirement by magic. If the handbook needs policy or safety review, obtain that review from the responsible person before use.

Use a short acceptance checklist before editing style. Copy the original constraints, turn them into checks you can observe, and trace the draft back to them. Keep factual failures separate from preferences so a fluent sentence does not distract you from a missing instruction. The next briefing looks for names, numbers, and commitments that a draft added without support.