Moving on, what I do believe is that many i-d's could benefit from a
review by a linguist.
This role, IMO, is different from the role of an editor. The linguist
doesn't need to have any technical background. He is more like a syntax
/ semantic verifier. It's common practice in other fields.
This sounds like what a copy editor does in the publication process.
The RFC production center staff has always done copy editing as part
of the process of turning an I-D into an RFC.
Nonetheless I think that John K's suggestion has considerable merit
for I-Ds whose authors are not fluent in written English (a situation
that I agree has surprisingly little to do with whether the author is
a native English speaker.) The reason is that often it is hard to
tell what a document is supposed to be saying, and the only way to
find out is to go back to the author and ask. This is very slow and
time consuming if each iteration has to go from the editor to the
author and back, If the document has a co-author who's working on it
all along, the rewriting could happen as the document was developed,
leaving only a final check for the copy editor.
--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)iecc(_dot_)com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet
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