Subject: a plea to ID authors

From: Lars Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 May 2006 17:16:36 -0400

Hi,

draft-iesg-discuss-criteria-02 says in Section 3.2 that DISCUSSes  
should not be raised for "pedantic corrections to non-normative text"  
or "stylistic issues of any kind."

Personal opinion follows:

I'd like to ask you as WG chairs to remind authors and editors that  
spell-checking and proof-reading a draft before submitting it to the  
IESG is still a very good idea, even if there is no risk of getting a  
DISCUSS for not doing so.

It is difficult to follow the technical content of a draft when  
constant misspellings, poor grammar, incomplete sentences, missing  
commas, etc. require frequent re-reading of sentences and paragraphs.  
A high rate of these things really distract the reader.

Additionally, one starts to wonder about the technical quality and  
matureness of a draft if the authors couldn't even find the time to  
run a spell-checker once.

Other nits (uncited/outdated references, boilerplate bugs, RFC2119  
keyword bugs, and much more) can also be easily found by running the  
latest version of the excellent idnits tool once before submission to  
the IESG.

Finally, fixing all these things early - instead of letting the RFC  
editor deal with them - may actually improve publication times. So a  
copy-editing cycle before sending stuff off to the IESG may actually  
be a good investment.

This stuff is easy to fix: Good tools exist on many platforms and for  
most draft production methods.

Lars
-- 
Lars Eggert                                     NEC Network Laboratories

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 May 2006 17:44:35 +0200

Let me endorse what Lars writes here.

I recall a draft not so long ago in which the last sentence of the rather
short Introduction stopped half way through. On investigation, this
truncated sentence had been present for four or five versions of
the draft and had survived both WG Last Call and IETF Last Call in
that state. Apparently, not one person had read the Introduction!

We can all make mistakes, but that sort of thing does sow doubt
about the document as a whole.

    Brian

Lars Eggert wrote:
> commas, etc. require frequent re-reading of sentences and paragraphs.  A 
> high rate of these things really distract the reader.
> 
> matureness of a draft if the authors couldn't even find the time to  run 
> a spell-checker once.
> 
> copy-editing cycle before sending stuff off to the IESG may actually  be 
> a good investment.
>

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From: Stewart Bryant <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 08 May 2006 08:19:51 +0100

> that state. Apparently, not one person had read the Introduction!

Of course any half decent document production tool would green line
such an error so that the author noticed.

So for us corporate Microsoft users, apart from cut and pasting the
draft to word (or presumably open office), is there any tool that 
highlights the spelling and grammar errors?

- Stewart

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From: Lars Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 May 2006 15:12:21 +0200

> highlights the spelling and grammar errors?

Word has probably the only widely used grammar checker and its spell- 
checker is OK, too. Generating HTML from xml2rfc and importing that  
into Word works pretty well. Doing this once before submission is not  
unreasonable overhead.

On Unix, aspell/ispell are pretty good at finding spelling errors in  
ASCII text, but don't do grammar.

Anyone know of an open source grammar checker?

Lars

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From: "Dan Wing" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 May 2006 08:35:12 -0700

> Anyone know of an open source grammar checker?

I haven't used any of these but I found a list of them at:

  http://lingucomponent.openoffice.org/grammar.html

-d