Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cassandra" data-source="post: 3449453" data-attributes="member: 18157">Editing and typographical errors drive me crazy. One of the first electronic products I ever read was so riddled with errors that I couldn't stand it - I had to start marking them all on my printout. Now I read game books with a pencil in my hand and circle the errors as I see them, so that I can go past and keep reading instead of obsessing over them. (Yes, that is not obsessing.) I would like to think that the products I edit would be error free - but they're not. I have had to accept that it is not humanly possible to produce error-free products in a finite amount of time.We wrote one book of about 160 pages which was printed. (Most of our products are available electronically.) We edited the heck out of it, trying to get everything right, and I know other people worked on it as well at the company that did the layout - nine people total. Every page was edited once or twice, read through by someone else, and then proofread by at least two people. Months after the proofs had been corrected and returned, I was looking through our printout of the proofs and discovered glaring errors that had been missed in the proofread. There were strange symbols that had been introduced by the layout program in replacing some punctuation marks it did not recognize - and no one had caught them. I didn't have a printed copy of the book available at the time to see if they had made it through into print, so sometimes I still wonder.The problem is, no method is infallible and sometimes using multiple methods introduces new errors. A spell-check needs a human check on it, but hand-correcting something can leave another error. All of the located errors can be corrected, but in making changes one crucial formatting code is removed, resulting in paragraphs being in the wrong order on a page. It can potentially be a never-ending cycle, and at some point a company just has to say, Enough! (That is not my job here, incidentally; I'm in charge of obsessing.) We try very hard to be professional. However, the process this writer described from his company for us involves two or three people, all of whom are also doing other important jobs in the company, and none of whom are being paid to do this full time. For instance, how does editing compare in priority with communicating with artists so that the book has art when the text is done? Or to... [Made Will save; rant avoided. I think you get the idea.]I just hope that people will avoid making sweeping generalizations about how things could obviously be better. ("Have all the writers do proofreading" - how do you think those errors got in there in the first place, eh?) Do let companies know when you're disappointed. Voting with your money is fine, but if a company doesn't realize that you're objecting to the editing rather than the content, you may not be getting your point across. Also speak up when you find something to admire; it will give publishers a reason to maintain or set high standards. I believe encouraging good editing will do more to improve standards than complaining about bad editing.</blockquote>

Verification