writers, freelancers, people who get comments on their texts. can we run a competition for the stupidest?

[hatwoman]

ok I might be wrong and maybe it's not in the running for stupidest but I am so overcome with exasperation that I feel the need to post.

the text went like this:

"Other actors expressed concern about the quality of baked beans. Thomas, a 7 year old child, said they were sometimes too mushy. Patrick, a cook at the Lazy Cafe, said that they didn't taste at all of tomatoes."

Now, is "Who are these other actors?" a fair comment? or a frankly ridiculous one?

I concede that a "for example" could enhance the text (though arguable) but please, asking "who"???

My publisher asked if I wanted to do the index for my textbook myself or pay their indexer to do it. It's a dictionary of policing terms fgs. They did have the good grace to be mildly embarrassed when I pointed this out.

The query in th op is a bit daft. Perhaps the querier was taking 'actors' in the wrong sense, and was expecting something about Lawrence Olivier's view of baked beans.

I have the opposite problem: the task of formulating insincerely polite queries about the most monumentally screwed up pieces of authors' texts.

I didn't mean that Hatwoman's post was daft, of course. I meant that 'who are the other actors?' is daft. Though actually, perhaps your editor was just too-opaquely suggesting that the use of 'actors' rather than 'people' wasn't ideal??