Thanks, Rebecca Condit, for Proofreading the blogdown Manuscript!
Yihui Xie / 2017-11-01
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.