anyone have time to edit a chapter?

[kareina]

I have been taking a break from writing chapter six by incorporating my advisor's comments/edits for chapter five, as a result, one chapter is pretty much to the final draft stage (well, as soon as I finish this task, which should be done before I go to bed tonight). He made it clear when he handed it back to me that his edits focused upon the science/content, and he caught only the most egregious grammatical errors. Therefore there would be much value in having someone else read through the text to check for spelling, grammar, and style (the thesis, having been written in chunks here and chunks there over a very long period of time has more than one writing style, some of which are far too informal for such a document, while I might be able to find and correct these, it would be much easier for someone who hasn't been looking at this text over and over again to see them).

So, is there anyone out there who happens to have the time in the next couple of days and has the skills necessary for such an edit? You don't, necessarily, need to understand the science involved, I'm just looking for help in finding the non-science problems with the writing. If you are interested in volunteering for this task (this chapter is ~ 20,000 words, including the list of figures and references) please let me know to what e-mail address I should send the file, and if you prefer it as a Word (2003) document (in which case you could make use of the 'track changes while editing' function), or as a pdf (in which case you'd have to make notes of errors found or suggested changes). (Note: the figures for this chapter comprise 22 pdf files for a total of 64 MB--looking at them whilst reading would make parts of the text make far more sense, but that is an awful lot of data to be e-mailing--if you want to see the figures too, you need to say so when you put your hand up, and I'll go in to uni to send the files so as to not exceed our upload limit from home. No, I do not expect most people would want to see them given the sum of the file sizes involved.)

If anyone thinks this sounds like an amusing thing to do, but you don't have time just now but will later, don't despair--there will be other chapters needing this same sort of help, once I've got them "done".

Many thanks to all, even those who don't have time/energy/inclination to help out with this...

Comments

edtiing

[ktmcg.livejournal.com]

15 years of tech writing and editing should be useful; send me anything you want me to read over for you. I have OpenOffice, so Word id fine, or a .pdf since I don't know if the track changes option works between openoffice and word.
-Krysta
ktmcg@yahoo.com

Re: edtiing

[ktmcg.livejournal.com]

of course my typing not so good... sigh...

Re: edtiing

[clovis-t.livejournal.com]

I believe that track changes does work between OpenOffice and word.

Re: edtiing

[kareina.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it does, but my computer has never yet succeeded in opening an OpenOffice file, so I just sent her a pdf. No point in sending her something and then not being able to read what she sends back...

Re: edtiing

[sismith42.livejournal.com]

with Open Office, one can save the document as a word 97 doc (though you do get "there's formatting issues here, don't you want to use a nice Open Office format instaid?" error messages...)

Re: edtiing

[kareina.livejournal.com]

that is good to hear, but, given the problems I've had with it in the past, you will understand why I wasn't willing to risk it this time--I simply can't spare the time.

Re: edtiing

[sismith42.livejournal.com]

oh, no I totally understand, just wanted to make sure you were aware of the possibility to get an Open Office user to send you things in useful formats, for future use...

Re: edtiing

[kareina.livejournal.com]

Heck, I just checked, it is possible to copy the text from the pdf of the chapter and paste it into Word, so, if she's motivated, she can do that into OpenOffice, do the edits with some sort of formatting showing changes, and print it to a pdf to send back...

Re: edtiing

[kareina.livejournal.com]

Just checking--did you get the e-mail I sent? It was sent reasonably promptly after you commented...

[darttn.livejournal.com]

I'm not an editor, or I would volunteer. The only thing I could offer is common sense comments. Hope you find someone real soon.

Loveyou
Mom

[kareina.livejournal.com]

lol--you did a fine job editing my Master's thesis, even if I did have to say "yes, that is a real word" fairly often since you don't speak geology jargon...

[darttn.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you got a chuckle out of it. But...did you find someone to do the editing?
Love you
Mom

[katerit.livejournal.com]

I could help out - now or later. I could do it in Word.

[kareina.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Since I sent Krysta this chapter last night before going to sleep, I'll wait and send you the next one (sure more than one set of eyes could be good, but I don't have the time to do multiple revisions to anything other than the abstract, which, when it is finally ready, will probably be posted here for as much feeback as possible).

If for some reason the next chapter happens to be ready for editing at a time you are too busy, no worries, let me know and I'll post again looking to see who has time that day...