[CRISP-TEAM] Alan Barrett's comments on the BW7 draft.

[Michael Abejuela]

I would agree with Alan on this point. I think it makes sense that the
cover letter be in a separate document as it is not truly part of the
proposal. I understand that for posterity it might make sense to keep it
all together; however, I observe the cover letter as a supplemental item
but not a necessary one to the proposal itself.  I think when people open
the proposal file to read, they would much rather prefer to go directly to
the proposal than have the first page that opens always being the cover
letter. Ultimately it¹s not a huge preference for me either way.

Just my .02

-Michael








On 1/15/15, 7:27 AM, "Bill Woodcock" <woody at pch.net> wrote:

>
>>>> I think that the cover letteer should be in a separate document.
>>> 
>>> I disagree.  I believe that our eventual primary work product should
>>>be a single PDF file containing everything in one.  If we split things
>>>into separate files, they will inevitably become disassociated in the
>>>future.  I don¹t think it matters much in the one-week timeframe, but I
>>>think this is very important in the two year + timeframe.
>> 
>> I won't insist on separation, but I do think that two separate
>>documents would make sense.  When I print the proposal, I don't also
>>want to print the cover letter.  When I view the proposal on a web site,
>>I want to see the revision control section at the beginning, not after a
>>cover letter.
>
>Hm.  I agree with your points, but still disagree that they outweigh the
>interest of posterity in not seeing related documents drift apart and
>become disassociated.  But this isn¹t an issue I care strongly about, so
>I¹d like to see a few other people weigh in with their opinions, so we
>can make a decision and move forward.
>
>> Most of the content of the cover letter is or could be repeated in the
>>Abstract, if you are concerned about context being lost.
>
>I¹d much rather just split into two documents than duplicate.
>
>> I'd put the table of contents after the abstract, but I'll defer to
>>your judgement here too.
>
>You start to get recursion weirdnessŠ  Do things that precede the TOC not
>appear in the TOC?  Do they appear with negative page numbers?  Does the
>TOC appear in the TOC?  If so, at page 0?  As soon as you start to
>venture into wacky territory, you¹re outside what software will
>automatically handle and update through style sheets (or, worse, outside
>what it will handle reliably), and then the copyediting becomes a whole
>order of magnitude more important and more difficult.  And we don¹t have
>time for that now, unless it¹s a set of manual changes applied at the
>very end, along with pagination.  And I¹d rather not add to the bundle of
>last-minute changes, since we¹ve already condensed what I said would be
>eight hours of work into four, and that makes me nervous about quality.
>I shouldn¹t be _just now_ finding whole duplicated paragraphs, as I just
>did.
>
>                                -Bill
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