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Comment by lanbanger | Hacker News Reader

The grammar makes that book fairly painful to read :-|

Hi, I would love to hear your feedback. It is the style or the correctness? I am really appreciate if you can show me the few incorrect usages of the grammar.

I can tell you're not native. Have the book proofread by someone.

Yes, I'm not native. For that reason I tried to use simple grammar and sentences, and did go through paragraph by paragraph through a grammar checker until the end of chapter 4. I will try to improve it gradually.

It is better to proof read for correctness. I myself want to point out few grammatical stuffs and looking for the source in Github. You can simple create a repo or add the source text to the current repo, so that people can easily fix these issues for you by giving pull requests.

You don't want people judging this excellent book based on few language quirks here and there.

Thanks. I will upload the source soon. As it is written in Lyx, not sure everyone will find it comfortable though. You can always open an issue in the meantime though.

Great. I just created an issue. You might want to create few guidelines in the repo for creating patches regarding typo/grammatical issues so that you can focus on the actual content of the book. Nice job with the book.

Just curious why you chose Lyx and not Org, for example. I still have your "emacs mini manual" open in my browser all the time, so I'm sure you feel natural in org-mode too.

Well, Org is suitable for small notes. But for the scope of this book, it's difficult to make Org work for such a complex layout (largely because I don't want to mess with the CSS).

I used Lyx because it enabled me to focus on the content without all the markup text. Writing Latex in Emacs can reduce the distraction, but not enough. I just wanted to focus on the content at the time. Learning Latex is difficult enough, learning how to use the major mode at the same time doubles the difficulty.

Obviously, I still use Emacs daily for writing code and other things. Just not for writing book.

Please do! I would also love to help you correct grammar issues via PR.

Thank you! I already put the book source online. You can use Lyx to edit the book source file.

Regular spellchecker can correct mistyped words, but not, for example, words miused in a particular context, missing the/a, etc. Try some of those more advanced contextual spellcheckers and proofreaders like Grammarly or LanguageTool.

"miused"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law

If this was intentional - well played. If not - thanks for the unintentional demonstration of Muphry's Law :)

[ten seconds later] Now scanning my own post really carefully for misspellings and grammar errors ;)

Why not hire someone in Fiverr to proofread this? Not sure if that is too expensive. Also, have a donate button for someone to donate. Then you can use that money to improve the book. GL!

Nice service! I didn't know it exists. Thanks.

Spelling error: MOSFET is misspelled as MOFET the first time.

Definitely. The content seems to be there, but this would really benefit from some copy-editing.

From just skimming through a few chapters I can completely understand what the author is saying but the grammar is jarring and pulls me out of the book.

Hopefully the author uploads the LaTeX source files to the repo soon. Grammar fixes are pretty trivial.

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