ACF Proofreading?

• From: lone1c <no_reply_at_yahoogroups.com>
• Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2004 20:50:08 -0000
• Message-ID: <c0rae0+grug_at_...>

So far, it doesn't look like this point has come up, so I'll throw it
into the ring. One of the big problems that we had here at MIT this
past weekend was that most of the packets didn't seem to have been
proofread very well. There were a lot of errors that would have been
caught by using a spell-check (e.g., "Lativa" for "Latvia"). Still
others were of the more pernicious "correctly-spelled word but doesn't
make sense here" variety (e.g., several instances of "his" for "this"
and "attacked" for "attached"). In addition, we found that in a lot of
cases, sentences were run-ons; in other cases, sentences were
insufficiently or incorrectly punctuated. Because we didn't have
confidence that the grammar of the questions was correct, we had to
expend considerable effort and time editing "on-the-fly." This is OK
for the occasional error, but gets old really quickly when you have to
do it all day long.

Finally, the length of many of the questions were also a factor, but I
think Charlie did a good job of summarizing that issue. Add all of
these up, and that added a good five minutes or so to each round (or
more than an hour in a 14-round tournament).

I can understand that the deadline for submitting packets was
relatively late this year, giving the editors an abbreviated period
for editing them. If there isn't sufficient time for the editors to do
a final proofreading, perhaps some of the responsibility could be
passed on to the regional hosts? Each host having to proofread, say,
two or three packets doesn't seem like it would be that big a burden.

--AEI