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As a heuristic, you should treat obvious errors in the body of a technical text as a red flag, but don't be so harsh on mismatched examples or diagrams. That st
by idlewords 3y ago
As a heuristic, you should treat obvious errors in the body of a technical text as a red flag, but don't be so harsh on mismatched examples or diagrams. That stuff is notoriously easy to mess up and doesn't tell you anything useful about the amount of thought or revision that went into the writing of the piece.
A more constructive thing to do than blaring the "FAIL" klaxon at the first such mistake is to just let the author know.
- lexicality 3y agoWriting is hard but a cursory proof reading would immediately spot that the first line of the error is completely unrelated to the description. What other more subtle errors are also there?
- beej71 3y agoSpeaking as someone who writes and puts stuff online, there are probably approximately 1.2 zillion subtle errors. The best thing you can do is point them out so the author can fix it for posterity. In a classic publishing environment, sure, edit the shit out of it before launch. But this isn't that environment. The fastest way to get quality, free content out there is to publish something and then have everyone tell you what's wrong, fix it, and move on. Working together this way, we produce libraries of material for anyone to use.