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On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 11:36:34AM -0500, Greg Rundlett (freephile) wrote: > I was asked by Packt publishing to do a technical book review (Apache SOLR > for Beginners) > > I'm wondering if anyone else on the list has been a technical reviewer > before and would share your experience. I've reviewed several of the editions in the series Unix and/or Linux Systems Administrator's Guide by Nemeth, Snyder, et al., at first unpaid, and then finally for pay. The folks at Prentice Hall were a delight to work with and they actually ended up paying me double what they originally offered... though that turned out to be a mixed blessing of sorts. > I was initially excited about the opportunity but it's become apparent, at > least in this case, that the quality is not all there. The author is > Italian, and I'm re-writing the book in proper English rather than making > quality/style assessments. I agree with Drew... this isn't your job, but letting the editor know if/that the material is incomprehensible is worthwhile. On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 05:20:35PM +0000, Englander, Irvin wrote: > Copy editing is somebody else's job. Unless the overall writing is > so bad that the whole topic is unclear and the book should be > scrapped, the English is outside the scope of the review. Despite what I just wrote about this not being the reviewer's job, I don't entirely agree. Even exceptionally literate people have bad days. If a particular passage is poorly constructed such that the effort to make sense of it detracts from the message (or distracts from receiving it), I think generally that's worth a brief comment. I think technical reviewers are generally chosen because they already have some sort of expertise in the field (or at least that's the hope)... If they can't understand what the author is saying, chances are no one else may be able to either. Given the nature of the material, A copy editor might not have the technical expertise to recognize that the passage in question isn't clear enough. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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