Re: OT: query regarding HTML

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

Carl and Myron,
Text-to-speech proofreading sounds like a *wonderful* proofing technique!
It is almost the equivalent of the gold-standard technique: having one
person read the text aloud to another, who is following along in a copy of
the text.
Although there's more visual information in a hard copy, a lot of it
concerns things irrelevant to reading.
I agree that reading hardcopy is a little easier and more comfortable, but
I still wonder whether the difference is worth the trouble. What trouble,
you ask. Researching the best printer to buy, buying it, setting it up
(often a horrendous task on Windows machines), getting it to work with
various legacy programs (none I will name here), buying paper, storing
paper, buying ink, ink, and more ink, figuring out what went wrong when it
refuses to print, stapling the output, putting it somewhere that you can
find it, etc.

Regards,
Harry
Reply to note from Myron Gochnauer  Sun, 26 Feb 2017
01:55:33 +0000

Myron,

>> ... At any rate, the common wisdom in the legal profession, at
>> least among my colleagues, is that you catch more errors by
>> proofreading from paper than from a screen.
>
> I agree with the common wisdom, though I do not understand why is
> would be correct.

I read or heard a long time ago, somewhere, that paper delivers more
bits of visual information to your eye/brain than the screen. This
seems intuitively true to me, but I couldn't find anything directly
corroborative when I looked earlier today.

A proofreading tactic that I've tried in the past is to change the
on-screen formatting of the document -- different font, type size,
margins, etc. -- anything that enables seeing the document in a
different light, so to speak. Text-to-speech readback falls into this
category, I think, and has the added advantage of engaging the sense of
hearing.

> ... discussion or lecture notes are *way* more effective for me if
> they are not only on paper but hand-written.

A friend of mine, a professor of English in the UK, writes all the
first drafts of his books and articles longhand, with a fountain pen. I
rediscovered fountain pens myself close to 20 years ago. When writer's
block descends, I retreat to a quiet place with my favorite pen filled
with my favorite ink, and (literally) sketch out my ideas on a piece of
foolscap. Highly recommended.

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx