RE quite rightly deplores the lack of proofreading nowadays. What is worse is bad proofreading.

I have just had a couple of pieces published in an anthology of local writers.

My perfectly punctuated

"Elderly women served food from unhygienic witches' cauldrons."

has been "corrected" to

"witch's cauldrons".

I have pointed out the error and been informed that as it has now been printed and put on sale it's too late to fix it.

It just had to be an apostrophe, didn't it ?

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life ?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off ?
Read all about my travels around the world here.
Read even more of my travel writing and poems on my weblog.

Oh, that is soooo funny, Bob. I am definitely going to buy the anthology!

Remember, my editor has been problematic, too. She definitely doesn't agree with the "boss's" apostrophe use, either. I have to write "boss'", if I want my writing published.

Congratulations on being published, B.H.!

What is the name of the anthology? Wouldn't it have been a hoot if the editor had decided to call it "Alices' Adventures Through the Looking Glass"?


(No, on second thought, maybe not...)

This I found while searching the Powell's Books web site: Nazi Psychoanalysis Volume 1. 1 Only Psychoanal

Well, Bob, now I have had a similar experience, and I am enraged. A colleague and I have written a protocol for the management of dyspnea, which took almost a year to write. It is a synthesis of all the literature in that field and is meant to be a scholarly review. We revised it following editorial and peer reviews and then sent it off to be published.

I received it yesterday, and I am just sick! The publishers made five egregious grammar errors. Now, I am not talking about something as benign as "Charles's vs. Charles.'" I mean this, that occurred on page 2 (the 2 sentences followed one another):

"Nelson et al studied 100 cancer patients in critical care; and found that 33% were dyspneic. Using the Medline database, Ripamonte; for references to dyspnea and found that dyspnea occurred in 21% to 79% of patients wtih advanced cancer."

Now you will all agree that I am not being petty here, I am sure. The second sentence isn't even understandable, really. This integrative review has many recommendations, facts and statistics. Why should the readers believe authors whom they believe to be careless? I assure you that we didn't send it off this way to the publisher. We had not been sent galleys before they printed it, perhaps because it was printed by a nursing organization, rather than a professional printer. This organization plans to sell it and to make money from it.

I am not a happy camper!

Even allowing for the fact that it is a specialist subject and that some readers will not be familiar with the references, it is clearly a complete hotch-potch.

I suspect that the editor had no idea about the subject otherwise he or she would have realised it made no sense.

To my mind it is vital that the final proofing is done by the original writer who will be, of course, a subject expert.

I have all my work proofed three times and insist on checking the printer's proofs even now. Although typesetting errors are a thing of the past, file corruption and page setup differences can make nonsense of a piece of work - even if the words remain unaltered.

I have had items back with blank pages (because a difference in the margin setting has created a page overflow) and missing text from text boxes (because a font has changed to a printer's default) and other errors that have crept in through the idiosyncrasies of Microsoft Word!

quote:

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Originally posted by Kalleh:
Using the Medline database, Ripamonte; for references to dyspnea and found that dyspnea occurred in 21% to 79% of patients wtih advanced cancer.

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So good to see that editorial standards are as high over there as they are over here.

I suspect that the editor had no idea about the subject otherwise he or she would have realised it made no sense.
If anything that is a kind conclusion. However, I don't think it is the case. First, anyone, not just someone in that field, would see that those 2 semi-colons are missplaced. Secondly, the publisher was a critical care organization, and people there would definitely be more familiar with the content than would people with a professional publishing company, such as WB Saunders.

I suspect that since it isn't a professional publishing company, the publishers were just plain careless. I just worry that we will look like the careless ones. This publication was a LOT of work! My colleague and I had thought they would send us the galleys before dissemintating it. Surely, we are going to contact them about that.

The curious part is how those errors got published because we didn't send the manuscript back like that.

Reviving an apostrophe thread...

Have you ever sent an e-mail, only to want it back the second after you'd sent it? Two of my colleagues have resigned, and I sent an e-mail inviting people to a party to celebrate their futures and to say good-bye. This was a mass e-mail...and one of the people who left had been our editor; it goes without saying that she is quite the grammarian.

As soon as I sent it, I knew that I had misplaced my apostrophe. No, it wasn't a typo; I had misplaced it. I said that we could "talk to our heart's [sic] content." And, I thought I had my apostrophe down pat!

I don't think there's anything wrong with our heart's content, as each person has just one heart. It's something there's no strict rule for in English, just as you can say everyone raised their hand and everyone raised their hands meaning just one hand apiece.

But it reminds of me Geoff Pullum's latest rant in Language Log on the pitfalls of using software. It's a long rant and is almost all about software, but the final paragraph is pertinent here. He and Huddleston have finally got the full, completed typescript of their A Student's Introduction to English Grammar ready. These people are the authors of the definitive current grammar of English.

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Now we move forward to the stage where a copy editor will work through the typescript, and unless Cambridge University Press has warned them about who we are, they will start changing our whiches to thats and our sinces to becauses and moving our punctuation to the other side of our quotes where we didn't want them and so on and so on. I will try to keep you (or at least WolfAngel) informed with regular rants.

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