July 9, 2008 at 1:03 am
Wanted to know if articles in SSC are proofread before posting.
July 9, 2008 at 1:36 am
How do I delete this post. Doesn't seem to be right to ask this question.
July 10, 2008 at 10:50 am
Nope, totally fair question. I assume this is the Monday article this week.
The articles are proofread and often sent back to authors with ideas and suggestions for improvement. We run them through a spell checker, but it's a high volume process with daily releases and we don't necessarily spend the same time that someone like a SQL Server Magazine does.
So mistakes get made and we have problems.
Apologies.
However we also want the authors to have their voices, so we don't try to heavily edit and rewrite things. At some point we make a decision to let authors go with somewhat broken English or strange expressions because that's part of who they are. This site is overwhelmingly English, but that's about 80%. So 20% of the people are from countries that primarily have other languages and there are lots of people that want to write from India, Russia, and elsewhere.
So, the long and short of it is that we try, we make mistakes, and we balance the author's voice with the need to get something most people can understand.
For this past Monday, that rests sorely on the editor's (my) shoulders. I must have released a draft version because there were mistakes in there that I know I corrected, but perhaps didn't save. I have gone through the article, spell checked, and reworded sections as well as apologized to the author (directly) and the community (in the discussion). The author also made a couple changes.
July 10, 2008 at 11:13 pm
Actually yes , it is the Monday article and though I had made a comment on the grammar being annoying, I wasn't too pleased to see so many comments on the language of the article.
I hope the author is not disheartened. I would encourage him to write more and take the comments positively.
July 11, 2008 at 10:04 am
I think the author is OK, and hope we'll see more.
Again, apologies.
July 11, 2008 at 12:11 pm
When my first article was posted, the comment I got was about the grammar of my article. I asked Steve to pull my article out of the website immediately because I felt awful. However later on some other people put in the comment and said the grammar actually was not that bad, the most important thing was the content of the article.
I did not read the article on Monday but I hope you consider the content before the grammar. We are not professional writer and Steve is not a professional editor.
Anyway you probably think the grammar of my post is totally wrong !!!
July 15, 2008 at 1:48 pm
I've been a professional editor and proofreader, and managed and office of such. It's really only critical when it reduces the ability of the reader to understand what the author intended.
If anyone is shy of submitting an article because of worries about grammar, punctuation, et al, I'm perfectly willing to help out on that. I also still know a bunch of really good proofreaders (I'm mediocre in spelling) who I'm sure would be glad to help on the occassional article.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
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