RE: Off-shoring of tech writing

["McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>]

Gene Kim-Eng replied to Barbara D's comment about a freelance editor who
has a good business as the "one editor here for every eight or ten
writers 'over
there' (wherever 'there' is)":
> 
> I wouldn't have minded having that editor-to-writer
> ratio with an all US-based writing team, either.

For me, pretty much any access ratio would be an improvement. 
There's no budget for an editor, and we're all so busy that no
peer-editing happens. 
I get the odd comment from people who review for technical accuracy, but
the most likely way that any writing errors (grammar, spelling,
presentation, intelligibility, flow) will get discovered is the good old
fashioned way:
Pulling the trigger on the release.

Y'all know the feeling. You slave over a set of documents, and finally
push it out the door. The moment it's released into the wild is the
moment you begin seeing all the glitches that you shoulda/woulda/coulda
caught.

So far, there's always a next time.

Time is the best remedy to wear away the glaze that protects your own
work from your own editorial eye.  If you don't get the opportunity for
that kind of time _during_ the release schedule, you'll get it at the
beginning of the next release.  OhmygawdIwrotethat?

In fact, a couple of schedule shifts have put me in a mini-lull for the
past couple of days where I've gone back over some material and fixed
some things, raised some alarms to query a couple of people, etc.....
between posts to the list of course.  Fear not, I'll soon go quiet again
for a while.

Kevin
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