Poor or non-existent editing

[daggers]

Not for the first time I have had to hold back from binning or setting fire to a Great War book upon finding error upon error in spelling or fact. I am not a proof reader but have an eye for a typo, except on this little keyboard.

Who is to blame for these sadly riddled volumes, author or publisher?  The latest culprit is sold at £25, so should be better.

Daggers

 

[Derek Black]

Spill the beans, what've you been reading?

 

I think proof readers as a job are extinct, just auto spell checkers now.

[seaJane]

We're not extinct, we're just not the publishers' top priority....

[daggers]

No name, no packdrill, though well deserved.  It happens that my son knows the author!

D

 

 

[Moonraker]

Initially the author, I suggest. Aren't most books today produced from electronic text supplied by the author? Presumably leading publishers would pass the text to an editor, hopefully, but not always, with some knowledge of the subject, but surely with an eye for grammatical infelicities and spelling errors. Some publishing houses then pass the copy to overseas companies for production. My Wiltshire book was typeset in India, and I assume this was from the slightly-edited version of what I had submitted on CDs, though I'm a little puzzled by the unnecessary initial capitalisation of one word that I had rendered as starting with a lower-case letter.

 

Reading page proofs (run-offs of the text as it will appear in the book) should always be done by the author but, as we have noted several times before, he or she can be over-familiar with the content and fail to notice errors. (At the other extreme are authors who want to re-write at this stage, though this runs the risk of altering how the text falls on other pages. In the days of "hot metal", publishers would allow authors a certain allowance for their last-minute corrections and charge them for anything in excess.)

 

An experienced proofreader is a real boon but, as SeaJane says, all too often seen nowadays is seen as a luxury.

 

Adverts still appear in some newspapers for a home-based proofreading course; I wonder how many students recoup the fees and if publishers tire of being approached by them with their new "diplomas".

 

Reviews of books from well-known publishers increasingly note the poor editing and proofreading.

 

It is essential that at some stage or other one's text is read by someone else.

 

Moonraker

[daggers]

Thanks for comments.  The offending book had the wrong spelling for a celebrated double VC, and an erroneous name for a high ranking royal duke, to name a very small sample.

The author may not be a regular wordsmith, but is clearly well versed in military matters.

Enough spleen vented for now.

D

[David Filsell]

Whilst much proofing is now poor, the real bugbare is the lack of competant copy editing. No author - even the very best - can successfully complete the final edit, nor can spellcheck. In a factual work an editor need to be both expert on the subject and in elegant writing and grammar.

I have just written a brief review of a book on Jutland which recieved rave reviews, The editing was appalling. Twenty or so uneccessary words could have been cut from one single page and heaven knows how many adjectives could/should have been. Equally a new book of essays on Gallipoli contains the same basic information in virtually every essay,  some contain unnessary academic, jargon and style. One page contains three consecutive repeats of the subject's name in three consecutive sentences; the word 'he' seems to have disappeared  from the authors keyboard fingers.

And finally editors too miss mistakes from time to time. That's the point at which a good proof reader should pick up the pieces.

[daggers]

David

Is that a test piece?

[Kimberley John Lindsay]

Dear David,

Well said. But you overlooked two spelling mistakes!

Kindest regards,

Kim.

[Black Maria]

I recently finished reading ' Follow me !  I will lead you !  ' and was quite surprised to find so many typos in a book published by

Pen and Sword . I noticed that the copyright was held by Coda Books and assumed it had previously been published as a print

on demand by them and P&S had copied it without checking for typos.

[daggers]

Two??

[David Filsell]

It certainly tested me. Only two mistakes. Almost a record.

And, as I noted, you cannot properly edit your own copy - particularly on an iPad after a good dinner! It's generally rush driven finger trouble rather than anything else in my case : ).

Edited 19 September , 2018 by David Filsell

[Kimberley John Lindsay]

Dear David,

Oh, that's different then: I was unaware that you had written the piece on an iPad - especially after having had a good dinner...!

Kindest regards,

Kim.

[David Filsell]

: ).

[Martin Bennitt]

I spent most of my working life editing copy on the desk of a world news agency so spelling, grammatical and other errors just leap out of the page at me. This apparent total lack of concern for decent presentation in a work that may cost a considerable amount of cash infuriates me. I guess the general view is “you know or can guess what it means so why should we worry? We can get away with it because you’ve already put your money down.”

 

Cheers Martin B

[Andy Wade]

22 hours ago, Kimberley John Lindsay said:

Dear David,

Well said. But you overlooked two spelling mistakes!

Kindest regards,

Kim.

 

Is it 'bugbear' and 'received?' Just wondering because I have only a basic grasp of wordsmithery.
Is that even a word?
Competent too? Just asking, because as I said,...

Edited 20 September , 2018 by Andy Wade
I may have found another one.

[Moonraker]

3 minutes ago, Andy Wade said:

 

Is it 'bugbear' and 'received?' Just wondering because I have only a basic grasp of wordsmithery.
Is that even a word?

Yes.

There's even a game.

 

Moonraker

[daggers]

That game is advertised with its name in a mixture of upper and lower case. Ugh.

[Kimberley John Lindsay]

Dear All, and Andy,

The other word should have been 'unnecessary' (but it is neither here nor there, really)...!

Kindest regards,

Kim.

[Bernard_Lewis]

For my book 'Swansea in the Great War' (Pen and Sword Books, 2014), naturally I wrote and then sweated over the 80,000 word text which was contained in a Word document. I was assigned an editor who I found very good, correcting my errors of grammar and inconsistencies. 

 

To be fair, I have no idea if she was clued up on the Great War and, naturally, she would have had little knowledge of Swansea people and places from 1914-18. So, if I got a (probably) little known Swansea name or fact wrong, it probably still got into the book.

 

I'd like to think that, after the editing, it was a smooth read with minimal errors of fact or grammar. Though in 80,000 words there's bound to be a couple of clangers...

 

Bernard

 

 

 

 

[Crunchy]

Correct me if I am wrong. In the old days one would submit a manuscript having worked it over with successive drafts to get the best copy possible before submitting it. Then an editor would work on it to improve the grammar, style, etc followed by a proof reader who would then read through the whole text correcting any last spelling mistakes, etc. Nowadays, some simply submit the first draft and IF an editor is appointed the budget they work to is so measly they can't afford to spend too much time working on a poor manuscript. As for proof readers, do they still exist?  With some of the books I have reviewed, it would seem the author is responsible for the final product. For the chapter I contributed to a forthcoming book on the MEF I did the proof reading, the 'editor' contributed nothing, and despite going over it several times I am sure I missed some mistakes. That said, that bloody annoying predictive text is the bane of my writing life. 

[Bernard_Lewis]

Obviously, I read and re-read my draft manuscript several times, correcting 'obvious' errors of grammar, spelling and style and adding, cutting and polishing it before I sent it to Pen and Sword. My wife read it, too. 

 

My editor certainly bombarded me with questions and queries and also tweaked the style and punctuation. She chopped out lots of commas that, with hindsight, I shouldn't have put in at all. And much more.

 

Though the narrative thrust was largely unchanged, she CERTAINLY added to the final work. It was a better book after her red pen.

 

I know that she had occasionally been sent manuscripts that were clunky in many respects. One was by a serviceman whose sildiering was better than his writing style. That's life. She did do a major job of revision on that.

 

And she proofreads as well as edits, as required.

 

Bernard

 

 

[johntaylor]

This is a very interesting debate, as I'm also flabbergasted by some of the errors that get into print.  I've been reading one book published recently by a university press, which I won't name (OK - it's called Rupert Brooke in the First World War) in which the date of the Gallipoli campaign is given as "2015" - not once, but several times.  The book is excellent apart from the proof-reading errors, but these are very distracting and make it hard to take the book seriously.

 

My own experiences help to explain how this can happen all too easily.  When I submitted my book (Deborah and the War of the Tanks) to Pen & Sword I was put in touch with an editor, who critiqued the content, and a text editor who checked for house-style etc.  They both did an excellent job, but the author still has to take primary responsibility for proof-reading, and especially for finding errors in the content which only an expert would know about. 

 

The real problem came when the marked-up draft was sent off to the typesetters, who were somewhere in the Far East, and from the results I can only assume they had a limited grasp of English.  I painstakingly went through the text marking up all the errors and sent it off, and when it came back I found a lot of the changes had been made incorrectly, sometimes with fresh errors introduced, and it had to be done all over again.  Someone who didn't have the time, or wasn't as fastidious, probably wouldn't have done this.

 

I was pleased with the accuracy of the result, until a friend - who happens to be Dutch - spotted a proof-reading error (I missed out an "an").  Maybe that's not bad out of 150,000 words, but it shows how even for a perfectionist, perfection may be unattainable.

 

John 

Edited 21 September , 2018 by johntaylor

[Moonraker]

1 hour ago, Crunchy said:

Correct me if I am wrong. In the old days one would submit a manuscript having worked it over with successive drafts to get the best copy possible before submitting it. Then an editor would work on it to improve the grammar, style, etc followed by a proof reader who would then read through the whole text correcting any last spelling mistakes, etc. Nowadays, some simply submit the first draft and IF an editor is appointed the budget they work to is so measly they can't afford to spend too much time working on a poor manuscript. As for proof readers, do they still exist?  With some of the books I have reviewed, it would seem the author is responsible for the final product. For the chapter I contributed to a forthcoming book on the MEF I did the proof reading, the 'editor' contributed nothing, and despite going over it several times I am sure I missed some mistakes. That said, that bloody annoying predictive text is the bane of my writing life. 

At some time or other, heed has to be taken of the publisher's house-style: how dates and statistics are rendered, for example. If the publisher has expressed an interest in the work before it is complete, then the author would implement the guidance.before submitting his/her final draft.  Traditionally a proof-reader (proofreader? proof reader?) would check the accuracy of the printer's work, with mistakes quite easily made because the printer would compose the text using individual metal pieces for each letter. Proofs are also sent to the author for checking.

39 minutes ago, johntaylor said:

...The real problem came when the marked-up draft was sent off to the typesetters, who were somewhere in the Far East, and from the results I can only assume they had a limited grasp of English.  I painstakingly went through the text marking up all the errors and sent it off, and when it came back I found a lot of the changes had been made incorrectly, sometimes with fresh errors introduced, and it had to be done all over again.  Someone who didn't have the time, or wasn't as fastidious, probably wouldn't have done this...

I'm happy to be corrected but nowadays isn't it more usual for "typesetters" to rely on electronic copy so they don't need to key in the text. But they do apply various fonts and type-size, import illustrations supplied by the author and more or less see that the text "falls" satisfactorily - ie that there are no "widow" or "orphan" lines at tops and bottoms of pages. With my proofs I recall having to improve some auto-hyphenation and do  further tweaks to improve how the page looked.

 

Moonraker

[Steven Broomfield]

I see today that the Man Booker Award judges have decided less is more and have cut out overly-long books. I don't read modern novels out of principle (I have other principles, if required), but over-long tomes really turn me off. I can also think of several recent books on the GW I have read where a bit of work with the red pen would have been a blessing.