On Monday, I received comments from the proofreader of the blogdown manuscript. There were 376 comments in the PDF, and that was much more than I expected! I have worked with Chapman & Hall a few times before, and I knew the proofreader would let me make changes like:

• Change “I recommend you to do something” to “I recommend that you do something”.

• Add “that” after “Note”, e.g., “Note that you should …” instead of “Note you should …”.

• Always move punctuations before double quotes (note that the positions of periods in the above two bullets are wrong!), and move footnote numbers after punctuations.

For some reason, I still forgot these things when I wrote the book. Anyway, I spent four hours on correcting these problems and returned the revised manuscript in the late night on Monday. I guess this book should be available for sale in January next year, thanks to my amazing proofreader Rebecca (Becky) Condit and production manager Suzanne Lassandro at Chapman & Hall. My editor John Kimmel told me “[…] no other books are getting published this fast.”

Becky is a truly professional proofreader. Occasionally I laughed at myself while working through her comments. Below are two examples that show how awkward my English writing can be sometimes.

She changed

“For a theme author aware of the fact that users may customize her theme, she will typically provide two ways: […]”

to

“A theme author who is aware of the fact that users may customize her theme will typically provide two ways: […]”

My original sentence feels so fragmented, and she made it much smoother. She also changed

“There is an internal helper function blogdown:::modify_yaml(), which may help you clean up the metadata.”

to

“The internal helper function blogdown:::modify_yaml() may help you clean up the metadata.”

Straight to the point! Why did I use such an awkward clause?

It is a blessing to have a proofreader like Becky to help me. There are so many unsung heroes and heroines in this world. I’m hoping to write more about them in the future.