discuss: How to interpret it?
Subject:
Re: How to interpret it?
From:
Rick Moen ####@####.####
Date:
11 Sep 2004 19:24:39 -0000
Message-Id: <20040911192428.GK21483@linuxmafia.com>
Quoting Rahul Sundaram ####@####.####
> Thanks. I think its very much required. I am willing
> to do a technical review of your document. I am not
> sure about a language review but i can try
Which reminds me: I'm curious about the physical flow of review
material through the system. That is, I've done language reviews for a
number of LDP works so far: I remember that Tabatha or Emma Jane posts
here calling for reviewers. I find them on the In Progress page[1],
which I try to remember to check occasionally. Then, I send back
to Emma Jane interweaved quoted text and suggested corrections for the
document being reviewed, like this bit (which I wrote for the Linux
Daemon HOWTO):
In the table of contents:
> 4.1 Forking The Parent Process
> 4.3 Opening Logs For Writing
[etc.]
Devin, in capitalised-word situations like that (titles and such), you
never want to capitalise articles (the, a, an) or prepositions (to,
from, for, of,...), except at the beginning of the phrase or sentence.
You're going to have to hunt down and fix these, since it would be
tedious for us both, if I were to list them all.
> A daemon (or service) is a background process that is designed
Not an error, but you can make the sentence tighter by omitting
unnecessary words:
"A daemon (or service) is a background process designed...."
> autonomously,with little
Needs a space.
> The Apache web server http daemon (httpd) is one such example of a
> daemon.
A couple of things: (1) The word "web" in this context is a proper noun.
You're not talking about any old web; you're talking about the
World-Wide Web. (2) Saying both "server" and "daemon" is somewhat
redundant. So, lose "server". (3) Saying both "Web" and http is
somewhat redundant. So, lose "Web". This gives us:
"The Apache http daemon (httpd) is one such example of a daemon."
But you should grep through your document for instances of "web" and
(assuming they refer to the World-Wide Web) capitalise them. (Again, I
will not list such instances individually.)
When I say I'm "curious about the physical flow of review material
through the system", here's what I'm getting at: We reviewers don't
know the authors, and they don't know us. We reviewers don't know how
receptive authors will be to our suggestions. We don't know if Emma
Jane just forwards our suggestions to the authors (after checking to
make sure we aren't cussing out the authors) and lets them pass
judgement on our corrections, or is applied to the candidate text by
other LDP volunteers, or what.
Volunteer copyeditors and proofreaders have to live with the strong
likelihood of having their hard work angrily discarded by authors who
may not, in many cases, even understand the logic behind our changes.
If we could be briefed on where and to whom our corrections go, after we
mail them off to LDP, we could at least minimise that likelihood by
fine-tuning the rationales we supply to match the audience they will
reach.
Personally, I figure that if _only_ 2/3 of my careful copyediting work
gets carelessly discarded by some (pardon me for letting my overeducated
effete, elitist attitude show here for a moment ;-> ) semi-literate
author, then I'm beating expectations, but I'd like to know how the game
works and who the other players are.
What I'd _love_ would be to be able to make inline corrections and have
my _clean_ version of the entire corrected document be at least
considered as the new master version (subject to someone checking that I
know what I'm doing and aren't messing up the author's work), because
then inertia would be in favour of my corrections instead of against
their inclusion -- but I figure that's never going to happen.
[1] http://www.tldp.org/authors/inprogress.html
--
Cheers, "Heedless of grammar, they all cried 'It's him!'"
Rick Moen -- R.H. Barham, _Misadventure at Margate_
####@####.####
