Thanks for another great post. This week, I've been reading a mystery that I was really enjoying until I starting noticing dozens of typos and grammatical errors, dropped "the's" on almost every page... It was quite off-putting. The Snarky Editor would've found a couple years' worth of material in this one novel! Here are a couple of examples: " Mac's swallowed, speechless"...The character is Mac. "They're also some water purification tablets..." Instead of "there are". "The waiter "bought" menus..." I wonder if this is more common in contemporary novels with all the digital automation, etc.?
It's a rare book that doesn't include a typo, because it's so very hard to catch every last one of them. But careless errors can really ruin a reading experience -- especially when there are a lot of them. An example like this book makes me wonder if the text might have been scanned from a printed copy, and then the author / editor didn't proofread carefully. Or perhaps it's just that they relied on automated editing, grammar check and spellcheck. Though spellcheck is getting smarter, it still sometimes can only recognize that a combination of letters forms a real word -- it can't always tell whether it's the right word. The more complex the sentence, the more likely that grammar check won't get it right. And Word's spellcheck / grammar check gets it's / its wrong about half the time!
Thanks for another great post. This week, I've been reading a mystery that I was really enjoying until I starting noticing dozens of typos and grammatical errors, dropped "the's" on almost every page... It was quite off-putting. The Snarky Editor would've found a couple years' worth of material in this one novel! Here are a couple of examples: " Mac's swallowed, speechless"...The character is Mac. "They're also some water purification tablets..." Instead of "there are". "The waiter "bought" menus..." I wonder if this is more common in contemporary novels with all the digital automation, etc.?
It's a rare book that doesn't include a typo, because it's so very hard to catch every last one of them. But careless errors can really ruin a reading experience -- especially when there are a lot of them. An example like this book makes me wonder if the text might have been scanned from a printed copy, and then the author / editor didn't proofread carefully. Or perhaps it's just that they relied on automated editing, grammar check and spellcheck. Though spellcheck is getting smarter, it still sometimes can only recognize that a combination of letters forms a real word -- it can't always tell whether it's the right word. The more complex the sentence, the more likely that grammar check won't get it right. And Word's spellcheck / grammar check gets it's / its wrong about half the time!