This week, I have been working on revisions to the new chapter on async programming in Rust I have drafted for The Rust Programming Language — one of the major projects occupying my time for the last few months. At almost 15,000 words excluding code samples, this is a fairly large piece of writing, even by my standards.

For the editing process, I printed out all 68 pages of text as they are rendered on the website, and am doing what I always do for sufficiently large editing tasks: marking them up with a classic red pen.

I have done this since high school, and I do not expect I will ever stop. Having a physical copy of something I have written provides a really helpful context shift. My brain goes into a different mode. I can get some mental distance from it, somehow: more like the experience I have reading someone else’s work. And even with reviewing others’ work, a printed copy is not the same as a view on a screen. Neither is bad; but they are very different.

So: red pen week it is!