|
I just finished reading chapter 3 and I have a few thoughts.
1. Spell-check is your friend. Gems (ha) like "develope" in chapter 3 are not actually words. Particularly egregious are sentences such as the following:
It needs stronger langauge (sic) to make the voter- verified paper ballot the legal reprentation (sic) of our vote, and beefed-up auditing procedures need to follow.
or
For example, in a normal audit, if you were examing (sic) randomly pulled purchase orders, and discovered an anomally (sic), your (sic) would pull a larger sample of purchase orders.
2. Subject-verb agreement is generally a desirable trait. Actually "verbs" in general are pretty desirable. For example, take this sentence from page 64:
Discrepancies — if the difference between machine count and manual count is excessive, whether or not the identified discrepancy would overturn the election.
(Without the verb, one can only wonder what the original point may have been.)
3. Proper punctuation often adds instant credibility. This sentence, while refreshingly free of spelling errors, is in need of serious editing by someone with an English degree or a basic grasp of the "langauge" (sic):
In one news account, in which logs showed 48,000 votes cast, but only 36,000 recorded, a technician e-mailed the “correct” results for the missing votes, claiming it did not change the outcome, though no one would ever know, because an audit trail didn’t exist.
The problem is "way too many commas", you see. Perhaps some of them could be transplanted to this earlier construction from page 57:
Before you start explaining that cryptography, redundant systems, or a secret pin number are the answer, let me explain: Cryptography doesn’t solve the problems either nor does redundancy or a receipt with a pin number.
(And for the record, the promised "explanation" never actually materializes: we're left with a simple re-statement of the premise without any explanation whatsoever. Alas.)
4. Using grammatical errors as a means of distracting from the inherent absurdity of a statement is a weak tactic. For example,
When the polls close, election workers can scan the bar code. This will take two poll workers approximately forty minutes to do an entire precincts (sic), giving us a 100% audit at the polling station {missing punctuation}
There's no basis whatsoever for this claim: there's simply no way to calculate the time it would take two arbitrary workers to count an unknown number of ballots containing an unspecified number of races for an arbitrary precinct of unknown size and voter turnout. Throwing in a few errors may distract some people, but any critical thinkers in your audience won't be so easily deceived.
I don't really have the energy to deal with chapter 4 at this point -- it's quite an ordeal for obvious reasons. Tomorrow's another day, however. Perhaps you could hire a new editor between now and then, and clean this thing up a bit. I mean I suppose it's fine if you're going to distribute it over the internet and all, but if you want to actually charge people for a printed copy I feel you should really make at least a token effort.
Lowly computer programmers: 1
Allegedly serious book publishers: 0
JC
:kick:
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
