Subject: Also on issues of time
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Posted on: 2011-09-17 04:02:00 UTC
I remember a story in which, due to the author's time confusion, a man ended up being the father of 3 by the time he was 6. He was in his 20s when the story began, but there are still several problems with that.
People have been known to complain about our emphasis on spelling and grammar. While Muphry's Law is in effect, and we're definitely not perfect ourselves, proofreading and proper spellchecking are important for a reason . . . namely, to prevent stuff like this:
Typo in romantic novel causes bowel movement during love scene.
"I apologise to anyone who bought my on-sale ebook of Baby, I'm Yours and read on pg 293: 'He stiffened for a moment but then she felt his muscles loosen as he shitted on the ground'," writes Susan Andersen. "Shifted -- he SHIFTED!"
I came across this last night and thought I should post it in this thread. It's from Torchwood - Another Life and reads: 'It's a hobbit I find hard to break.' For me, it immediately conjured up mental images of poor Frodo being tortured, but still refusing to give up the information.
I remember a book series I read that half of the time had no commas for when somebody was talking.
e.g.: "Blah" x said.
Correct is "Blah," x said.
I managed to find a typo in a National Geographic issue where a four letter word was incorrect. Four letters! How hard can that be?
Then there's the Goblet of Fire teaser poster incident. The original was missing a comma! They had to release two!
While not in a published work, my school makes plenty of these. The attendance office managed to mess up the roll sheets enough that a friend of mine's last name was misspelled. Her last name is Oh. They spelled it Ho. How can you say fail?
Small words are just as easily to misspell as larger words. Easier even, I would say, because with the longer words you're probably paying more attention to what your fingers are typing.
But long words cause trouble to. Yesterday I was checking out some vacancies posted in the window of a temping agency. One of the headlines asked for people who had graduated to a bachelor degree. But rather than say graduated, the headline said something that meant "kicked off". I think who ever messed that up was aided by spell check, as in Dutch, the two words are rather different, but close enough the same that spell check would guess the one if you were trying to go for the other.
Well, not typos to that magnitude, but I did once read a novel where a large chunk of time was jumped a few times, and the author must have missassessed how much. The narrator of the story was referring to his wife, son and baby of unknown gender, but the wife had gotten pregnant about 12 months earlier. Most parents know the gender of the baby by then.
In another novel there was a power cut and the character managed to reach her power company and scream at them about how much money's worth of meat she had in the freezer. The telephone operator replied to her she should check the company's website for compensation.
This is wrong for two reasons: 1) customer service of power companies aren't open at all hours. She could not have reached one at the time she was calling. 2) in the Netherlands there is a standard compensation for consumers in case of a power cut. Customer service would have told her about the standard compensation and that it is automatically deducted from her next bill.
And there are typos, of course, there are always typos.
So, yes, I do believe we should be hired for editing work (or at least I should be).
I have started marking out the errors I come across in novels and books. Not sure yet what to do with them. I don't know how well publishers will take it if you sent them a query mentioning a few of the spots one of their current editors has missed.
I remember a story in which, due to the author's time confusion, a man ended up being the father of 3 by the time he was 6. He was in his 20s when the story began, but there are still several problems with that.
People need to start hiring us as editors. And paying us, even!
I find more typos in the Halo novels than anything else--including minis! It's not USNC.
There are more than typos in those. Halo: the Flood is the dubious origin of a magical double sex change over the course of a paragraph and Marines managing to shoot Jackals in the head after the Master Chief knocked them to the bottom of a cliff in the previous sentence. On the other hand, it had Yayap.
Ha! I think having a public eye over an author's work before publishing would be a good asset.
Besides, regarding the USNC error, it's just a simple abbreviation mixup - right idea, wrong organisation (and theatre of war, for that matter)