XQuery, XPath, XSLT and XQuery Serialization 3.1 (Back-to-Front) Drafts will be published quite soon so I wanted to give you a heads up on your holiday reading schedule.
This is deep enough in the review cycle that a back-to-front reading is probably your best approach.
You have read the drafts and corrections often enough by this point that you read the first few words of a paragraph and you “know” what it says so you move on. (At the very least I can report that happens to me.)
By back-to-front reading I mean to start at the end of each draft and read the last sentence and then the next to last sentence and so on.
The back-to-front process does two things:
- You are forced to read each sentence on its own.
- It prevents skimming and filling in errors with silent corrections (unknown to your conscious mind).
The back-to-front method is quite time consuming so its fortunate these drafts are due to appear just before a series of holidays in a large number of places.
I hesitate to mention it but there is another way to proof these drafts.
If you have XML experienced visitors, you could take turns reading the drafts to each other. It was a technique used by copyists many years ago where one person read and two others took down the text. The two versions were then compared to each other and the original.
Even with a great reading voice, I’m not certain many people would be up to that sort of exercise.
PS: I will post on the new drafts as soon as they are published.