A second assistant can help inspect a draft, but agreement is not a certificate of truth. If both assistants rely on the same unsupported statement, they can repeat the same problem in different words.
Give the reviewer a defined task and material it can inspect. Begin with a short draft, not an entire archive of unrelated documents.
Break the draft into claims
Highlight statements that can be true or false. Keep one claim per row where practical. Separate an observation from an interpretation and a promise from a general explanation.
Attach the relevant source location to each factual row. If there is no source, mark the gap. Do not ask the reviewer to assume that the author already checked it.
Use a bounded review request
Try this structure:
Check the listed statements against the supplied evidence. For each one, report supported, contradicted, or not established. Identify the exact source passage and explain any mismatch briefly. Do not treat a plausible statement as supported merely because it sounds familiar.
Add separate questions about missing steps and unclear wording. Factual support and readability are different review jobs.
Check the reviewer too
Open each cited source and verify the location. A reviewer may misunderstand a passage, miss a qualification, or report a problem that is not there. Preserve both the finding and the human decision.
Use a compact issue record: sentence, finding, evidence, correction, and approval. If a claim remains unresolved, remove it or make the uncertainty clear rather than converting it into an approval mark.
Try a small review exercise
Write a fictional draft containing one claim supported by a supplied note, one contradicted claim, and one claim the note does not address. Run the review and inspect all three outcomes yourself.
This is a way to evaluate the review process, not a claim that the example has already been tested. A useful reviewer makes the reasoning easier to inspect. The person responsible for publication still decides what the evidence establishes.
Keep a usable record
Save the input, the output you accepted, and the reason for your decision together. Add the date and the version of any software involved. Someone returning to the task should be able to repeat your checks without guessing what happened. If a required fact is still missing, write down the missing fact and the next action instead of filling the gap with a plausible answer.
Mika is an editorial pen name used by the KENJTEC editorial team in Hamburg. This article proposes a workflow; it does not report a completed test.
