how to make roundlessness work, in one brief post

here's how to make a roundless system work, in a nutshell... 1. do aggressive preprocessing. 2. use nonintrusive zen markup. 3. submit the page to a p1 proofer. 4. repeat #3 until no change is made. 5. submit the page to a p1 proofer again. 6. if a change is made, go back to step #3. 7. if there is no change in #5, page is done. if you want it even briefer, do aggressive preprocessing, and then repeat processing through p1, until you obtain 2 consecutive rounds of no change, and the page is done. for greater accuracy, or if you have proofers in abundance, repeat until you get 3 consecutive rounds without change. (but the increased accuracy isn't worth the increased work.) for lesser accuracy, stop after 1 round that sees no change, but the decreased accuracy here is too high a price to pay... aggressive preprocessing is the secret, because most errors can be located automatically, so the pages are clean before they even get to "proofers", who are really "smoothreaders". this, of course, is the same formula i've suggested for years. (once you've hit upon the right answer, no reason to change.) you can easily assure yourselves that this is the right answer; track how many errors persist through 2 rounds of no-change. (versus how many persist through 1 round, 3 rounds, 4, etc.) no need to collect any messy stats. just 2 rounds of no-diff. the time you spend exploring other stuff is just wasted time. just watch. this is the formula that will prove to be the best. and when you get around to admitting it, i'll say "i told you so". -bowerbird

aggressive preprocessing is the secret, because most errors can be located automatically, so the pages are clean before they even get to "proofers", who are really "smoothreaders".
Agreed with this part at least -- many motivated "early readers" love a particular author, and would be happy to get early access to the text via some kind of tool that allowed them to fix or at least mark the bugs they find as a part of their reading. "Marking" bugs as a part of reading could be as simple as asking them to read on a notepad or what have you and put a Q-mark in the text where they think they see a bug. Then diff their back submission to find the bugs that need to be fixed. Readers of e-books could even back-submit a "bookmarks" file that tags where errors were seen allowing proofing to be done on any e-book reader.
participants (2)
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Bowerbird@aol.com
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Jim Adcock