[Rant] Do editing/proofreading errors drive you mad, too?

[Odhanan]

Yes, it does bother me. The last time I brought the subject up to a professional I got an answer of the type "but it's normal to have typos, besides, these aren't novels or literature".

That made me stop and consider. So it's okay to write using bad English, typos and so on when it is not a novel? It's okay to be sloppy on the quality and inner coherence of the product you're selling? I cringe just to think of it, personally.

There's no excuse I want to hear for work that is not well done. Fact: It was not well done. Next steps: accept, learn, analyze, strategize, implement and move on. Ergo, what I'd rather want to hear is how it's going to be fixed (and by that, I don't mean errata after publication obviously).

/rant

 

[Jack of Shadows]

It drives me nuts,

I've described it akin to driving down a road and hitting invisible speed bumps. It's really jarring. I swore off Mongoose for a long while because the editing was so terrible. But apparently I wasn't alone in that because they made big strides to improve. WotC knows that they can get away with it. We will bitch and complain but we'll still buy their game books.

It REALLY drives me up the wall when I find them in a novel. I don't know if my English skills have become that much better over time or that the publishing industry has gone downhill but there seems to be a LOT more mistakes these days then in years past.

I have a suspicion it's a combination of the growing illiteracy in North America and over reliance on word processors to do all the heavy lifting.

Jack

 

[wayne62682]

Yes, it drives me mad. There is absolutely NO EXCUSE for such shoddy quality in books, especially when it's something like having things say different things and contradict each other. IMO it's pretty deplorable.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

Typos and errors can annoy me, more so in novels and nonfiction books than in game books. WotC looks like a paragon of perfection compared to most other RPG companies, especially third-party d20 publishers. That doesn't mean it's excusable for WotC, but at least they own up to it and publish errata. Lack of errata =/= error free.

 

[blargney the second]

Although it used to bother me a lot, I've gotta tell you that I hardly even notice anymore. I think the internet helped to significantly lower my expectations.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

It only bothers me when it is horribly jarring. Like the old AD&D 2nd ed Encyclopedea Magica. Someone went through with a Find/Replace for the word "mage" and we ended up with a book filled with spells doing things like 1d6/level cold dawizard.

 

[John Cooper]

Do editing/proofreading errors drive you mad, too?

Yes. Yes, they do.

 

[Teflon Billy]

Yes. Yes, they do.

LOL

 

[tempus edax rerum]

Typos! Page XX!

Usually it doesn't irritate me that much with d20 products - but for some reason it really bothers me in White Wolf products. Is it because they're trying for a more literary/pretentious feel and that makes the errors all the more grating? I'm not saying they have more problems than other publishers - theirs just aggravate me more. Reign of the Exarchs was the most recent product I read and it was typo-riffic!

 

[hong]

I'd forgive all of White Wolf's page XX errors if only they'd put a decent table of contents in their books.