How to Review Technical Writing

Technical reviewing is a service performed for a specific author on specific terms the author defined, with the goal of enabling the author to act on their specific request. This paper teaches the method. The method is a loop: identify the requested operation, accept or decline cleanly, read the document on its own terms, perform the specific operation faithfully, report findings as a disciplined technical document, and move on. Each step has pass/fail criteria. The failures that dominate current technical reviewing — reading against the document's frame, substituting the requested operation, unrequested aggression, overriding authorial authority, inverted rigor assessment — are violations of specific steps in this loop, and can be identified and repaired by reference to the step they violate. The paper is the master reference for reviewers who want to serve authors reliably and accumulate standing across many reviews. It assumes familiarity with [@HOWL-INFO-6-2026], which establishes technical writing as the uploading of a specific thing into a specific reader's head; reviewing operates on documents produced by that process, and the reviewer's output is itself a technical document subject to the same discipline.