If you haven’t yet experienced the sublime joy of reviewing other peoples documents, you don’t know what you’re missing (and you should probably keep it that way). However, it’s pretty much unavoidable that in some point in your career you’ll have to do this. Once you go through this process a few times, you’ll realize that there are a few things that you keep seeing over and over again. No matter how many times you make a comment about it, these issues just won’t go away. With that in mind, I’ve listed two of the most common mistakes that I’ve come across below. Despite my best efforts, I see them in almost every document I review.

1.) Not updating the table of contents - This is a gut shot, as this has to happen in 99% of the documents I review. Bottom line: This should be the last thing you do before you a submit a document for review. Even if you don’t think that any page references have changed, just do it anyway. The only thing worse than when page numbers are wrong are when there are a bunch of “Bookmark undefined errors”. In summary, update and visually check your table of contents before submission.

2.) Wrong page numbers - This most commonly happens when the footer gets screwed up between sections, i.e. it’s set to follow the previous section when it should start again. Conversely, this can also happen when a section is removed. Overall, just spot check your page numbers when you’re done with a document. An easy way to see if a page number is off is….wait for it….update the table of contents! When you update your table of contents, you’ll know right away with just a quick visual inspection if something is amiss.

The point? Simply put, keep the above two items in mind whenever you’re creating a document. Every time that you don’t make one of these errors, it’s one less comment that a reviewer has to make and you have to incorporate.