I enjoy reviews, I love to help folks with paragraphs, charts, and code. I can only do it once. Or at least do it properly, do it thoroughly. After that, the work is in the back of my head already, I’m sort of in the author’s shoes.
It is hard to adequately proofread your own work. You already “know” the ideas it conveys, or think you do. You might read “the the” without noticing the typo because mentally you’ve already leapt ahead to the meat of the sentence. You won’t need to look up acronyms or variable definitions because you’re already familiar with them, and the chart axis units are “obvious”. Not so for a beginner.
But I can only approach your work with beginner eyes once . After that I have already chased down my outstanding questions, and my eyes will glaze over a bit as I read a lightly edited paragraph and say to myself “yeah, yeah, seen that already, next.” I can still offer high level critiques of the approach, suggesting new problem solving angles, but it will be harder to attend to the minutiae.
So to take advantage of limited reviewing bandwidth, I encourage you to self review, to read through the entire work one time from the perspective of a reviewer, preferably in a different environment from your usual editor so you can see it afresh. Fix up any details you see before submitting it to me. Then I won’t be distracted by them, and we can keep the review dialogue focused on items more substantive than typos. Thanks!
Copyright 2022 John Hanley. MIT licensed.