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Tony Markos wondered: <<Someone recently posted about having people
review his/her up to 600 page manuals. Can such reviews result in
significant feedback such as reorgan1zation suggestions or the filling
of logical "holes", or will feedback on text be limited to minnor
corrections?>>
This depends on the reviewer and on your instructions to the reviewer.
Someone who is really interested in doing a good review will do so with
or without your instructions, but will do a much better job of focusing
on the things you consider most important if you provide clear
instructions as to what is important. Someone who isn't interested in
the review process will try to get through it as fast as possible,
doing as little work as possible, and will do a shoddy review if you
don't provide sufficient motivation (threats or rewards, as the case
may be <g>).
If you submit a document full of distractions (i.e., typos,
incomprehensible sentences), even the most stoic reviewer will be
distracted and will focus on fixing these problems rather than
concentrating on the meat of the review. I've worked with enough
scientists and engineers to know that they love catching me in typos or
other infelicities, and if I leave those in the document I send for
review, they'll fix them instead of concentrating on technical
correctness. That's not "theory", by the way; it's 20 years of
experience speaking.
Indeed, I make a good living these days editing journal manuscripts
before peer review for authors writing with English as their second or
third or fourth language. My promise: I'll clean up the document so
thoroughly that the journal reviewers can actually focus on their
science, not on how they're describing it. Journal editors love this
service because it lets them do their job (improving the quality of the
science that gets published through careful peer review) rather than
fixing the language used to communicate the science.
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