How Hard is Double-Checking?
I read the SFGate every day. Sometimes, if something big is going on, I read it twice a day. Know what else happens every day? I find a mistake. Sometimes it's a typo, but sometimes it's the wrong tense of a word, or a word that doesn't belong at all, or a grammatical error. Some days I even find two mistakes. Every day there is at least one.
I know nothing about the newspaper business. Or the writing business. But don't these people have editors? I took exactly one English class in college. Well, actually I took two. But I failed the first one. In the second one, I got a C. It would have been a B, but I handed in my final research paper late (minutes late, not days late, or even hours late) so my teacher refused to grade it, which knocked my grade down by a letter.
My point is, I'm no rocket scientist when it comes to writing. (Does that even make sense, or did I just make myself sound like Kelly Bensimon?) But if I'm finding one or two mistakes every single day, imagine how many more there must be that I'm missing. If the SFGate would like to hire me to edit, I would be happy to take the job.
I know nothing about the newspaper business. Or the writing business. But don't these people have editors? I took exactly one English class in college. Well, actually I took two. But I failed the first one. In the second one, I got a C. It would have been a B, but I handed in my final research paper late (minutes late, not days late, or even hours late) so my teacher refused to grade it, which knocked my grade down by a letter.
My point is, I'm no rocket scientist when it comes to writing. (Does that even make sense, or did I just make myself sound like Kelly Bensimon?) But if I'm finding one or two mistakes every single day, imagine how many more there must be that I'm missing. If the SFGate would like to hire me to edit, I would be happy to take the job.
Labels: Work
posted by Green at 7/07/2010 06:42:00 AM
6 Comments:
As a former copyeditor, it's easy to read something for the first time and pick out all the copyediting mistakes. When you read through pages upon pages of stories (as the newspaper editors have), the words tend to swim before your eyes after a while, and one or two mistakes slip through. Yes, it's their job to catch them, but you're also not reading every single word that goes into that paper -- they are. Presumably, you're skipping some of the stories or sections that don't interest you.
Additionally, there are some grammatical rules that may not look right, but actually are. I see a couple of grammar mistakes in your post, though I noticed them because I spent a fair amount of time learning the rules so I could proof others' work.
Thanks for giving your perspective Keith. I don't think the fact that editors read so much that the words swim before their eyes is an excuse though, since that's their job, but I'm kind of harsh that way, and it's why I always expect to get fired over any little mistake I make at every job.
You're right - I don't read every single story, just the ones that interest me.
In general, in the newspaper business, proofreading has taken a lot of cuts. My husband used to be a proofreader at a daily here, and now he's a journalist, working in the same building. There are half the proofreaders that there were in his day!
Also, that was the paper paper. If you read the SFGate online, it's a different ballgame. They've got more daily deadlines, and the deadlines are way shorter. They don't have time to get proofread, if say, there's an earthquake. Then you just want to get the article online as fast as possible. My husband writes for the online version of his paper. www.eb.dk if you're curious.
He gets lots of daily emails about his typos and spelling mistakes, despite him having been a proofreader. Some of them are neutral. A lot of them are mean. One guy wrote: may your shocks shrink in the wash! Hubby forwarded that one to me. I actually wrote back to the guy, and assured him that I did the laundry, and no such thing would happen. Because, after all, my husband doesn't earn enough to buy socks all the time!
I don't have anything to add, really... except that I love it when people use punctuation marks correctly. That's all I got after reading the post and the comments herewith.
I know. Lame comment. Lame duck. Hey, didn't you have a video collage of duckfaces on your FB? :-D
Worst is the streaming headlines at the bottom of the TV screen. If you believe them, you can be "retired" after a hung jury.
I'm with you, Green. I can't read anything without mentally editing it and noticing mistakes. Not that I am perfect, either, and I forgive folks an error or two because (as Keith noted) it is hard to read thousands of words at a time and not miss at least one error. I also tend to forgive errors in blogs or other informal writing. But I get genuinely annoyed when I find several errors in a short, professionally written and edited piece.
That said, though, some of the grammar and style they use in newspapers differs from other professions, such as the legal profession. For example, lawyers (at least here in Arizona) are taught in law school to use the "serial comma": He likes to run, swim, and play tennis. But AP Style manuals forbid that second (or last, if it's a series of more than three) comma: He likes to run, swim and play tennis. To me, the AP-Style lack of a comma looks like an error because I'm so used to seeing that second comma, but to a newspaper editor, legal briefs probably seem to be filled with comma errors. Yet both are "right" in their own worlds.
Still, I do think that grammar skills have declined generally. Or maybe I've just become more neurotic as I've gotten older. Either way, I notice a lot more errors in today's published media than I did fifteen years ago.
Post a Comment
<< Home