ASA Qeustion #50.

[greymule]

The ASA rule book could benefit greatly by being gone over by a good umpire who is also an English teacher.

Glad to hear somebody say that. An expert in writing methods and procedures would be the ideal candidate. Somebody who writes instructions for how Bristol-Myers Squibb or GlaxoSmithKline employees should operate the machines that manufacture drugs cannot leave anything open to interpretation.

I have toyed with the idea of rewriting the ASA book from beginning to end, keeping the good, recasting the bad, marking the areas of ambiguity as items to resolve, and then submitting it to ASA as a fait accompli. If they were presented with a document they judged to be an improvement, they might accept it.

Cleaning up the index, which has long contained mis-references, wouldn't take more than a few hours. Mike is right that the overall organization of the book is fine.

I did teach high school English in the early 1970s, but that in itself is not really a qualification to write M&Ps. By coincidence, our principal was Robert F. Kanaby, who is now the executive director of NFHS. A few years ago, I was going to approach him about polishing the Fed book, but then I stopped doing Fed.

I think rewriting the book might be fun if I could submit sections to our "committee" of posters for review and criticism. Would anyone agree to serve on the board of contributing editors? With the combined brainpower and experience of this board, we could produce a masterpiece.