Re: Reading a draft "for content only"

["Gray,Gary P" <GRAY -at- BOS -dot- MSMAIL -dot- IDX -dot- COM>]

> I've never seen this either -- at least not to the extent that it's
> being complained about here?  What kind of edits are they, anyway???

I've encountered one case of this. Back when I was doing contract jobs, I
had an engineer cover a draft with objections to my grammar... almost all
of them were baseless (this person did not understand the difference between
"its" and "it's" among other simple grammar rules).

In this case, I think the person had a grudge. He had wanted to revise the
manual in his spare time, so he could make some extra cash. Instead, his
company (wisely, it seems) decided to hire me to do it. He figured he could
show me up by being ruthless in his criticism. I was
steamed for a while, and had a notion to stick a fresh copy of the manual
into an envelope along with a copy of Strunk and White and a note saying
that perhaps he'd like to do it the right way this time... But, since I had
to work with the guy, I shrugged and kept on working.

In general, however, I don't have a problem with anyone reading my documents
pointing out
an error. Better a programmer in my company than a customer. I do find that
maybe one
third to one fourth of all of the grammar related comments are wrong... but
often times, there is something awkward about the sentence in general that
makes the person thing the grammar
is incorrect. It may be grammatically correct, but it probably can use a bit
of tightening up, and I find myself revising those sentences a lot of the
time anyway.

Gary Gray
Technical Writer
IDX Systems Corp.