Beta readers: who will save the Grammarian?

Today over on Write Anything, I talk about beta readers for my WIP. I'm almost ready to send it to the betas, so how do I decide who to send it to?
Beta reading is not editing. A beta reader is like a beta tester for software---their task is to take the rough product out for a spin and find the big problems with it. When I get this draft to them, I don't want to kid myself into thinking that it's fine as is, that my beta readers will go over it and find nothing wrong. On the contrary, if a beta comes back with "Great! Loved it! Publish as is!", I would suspect that something had gone wrong in the beta process.

I guess I do a pretty good job of selling the thing when I talk about it. I say this because I'm VERY fortunate in that I've had a number of people offer to beta/crit "Goodbye Grammarian". Rather than having to go out and recruit, it's more a case of drawing on all the help my friends and fellow writers have so generously offered.

What qualities should a beta read have? Read the post to get my take on it.

And, as a special teaser feature, go read "Verbosity's Vengeance", the story that provided the genesis for this WIP. I hope you like it.

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