1. In the old days, a typesetter typed galleys from
copyedited paper manuscripts. Some of them added lots of
errors, but most were good at catching errors and asking
questions. Then a proofreader read the galleys against the
manuscript. First pages were styled from the galleys, and a
different proofreader read first pages against the galleys.
For a second pages proofreading, usually only corrections to
first pages were checked, but if first pages were messy, then
second pages were often read straight through. Sometimes
there were third pages. So many sets of eyes ought to catch
"affect" that ought to be "effect" every time.
Now there are books that don't see
paper until they go to the printer. There's no typesetter;
essentially, copyeditors are often creating the equivalent of
galleys on screen from the author's Word files, and then a
graphics person coaxes the files into pages, which may be
proofread in .pdf
(which I find very difficult) or not at all. It's amazing
that so few workers do such a fine job by and large.
In my opinion, a careful paper
proofreading is necessary when technology is involved because
so many things can go wrong unintentionally--paragraphs moved
to a different chapter and not deleted from the first
location, global changes that shouldn't have been made
globally, that sort of thing. Scanning is done a lot in some
areas of publishing and always creates problems. A lot of
your ware-wane errors came into print there. The classic
scanning error is "m" vs. "rn." I suspect too many people
think scanning is the same as photocopying.
However, the Internet certainly makes
fact checking easier. I can look things up now that would not
have been feasible 10 years ago--for example, spellings of
names that are too obscure to be in dictionaries and standard
reference books. (I have a reference book that has the state
bird of Pennsylvania as the ruffled goose.) Then again, 10
years ago I didn't have to copyedit URLs. 2. The good old
days of perfect books is mostly myth. Maybe 15 years ago I
worked on reprints of Grace Livingston Hills, sort of
Executioners for nice girls 50-75 years ago. The originals
were littered with typos, worse than I've seen in any recent
professionally published paperback fiction. (Some racist bits
were edited out of the new printings, but the nasty classism
remained.) Other old books I've read are not so hot. 3.
Women's lib brought problems to nonfiction. All those
secretaries who used to type all those books for their bosses
are just about gone, and all those bosses have to rely on
their own knowledge and skills. I'm just guessing this point,
based on my corporate experience when the bosses were
switched from secretaries taking dictation to word processors
transcribing tapes. The secretaries actually wrote the memos;
the WP people merely typed what they were told.
Joy, who'll bring this back to proper list topics by noting
that she was listening to a rerun of the C-SPAN F. Scott
Fitzgerald show while typing this and learned that the St.
Paul Fitzgerald Theater, where Guy Noir works, was named
after F. Scott
Ray Skirsky <
rskirsky@qualcomm.com> said:
> My comment was not a shot at copy-editors, but
rather publishers who've
done
> away with copy-editing--and proof-reading--to save
money.
> In the course of my reading, both fiction and
non-fiction, I see lots of
books
> full of typos that convert one word into another
(e.g. ware into wane),
> that aren't
> caught by spell-checkers, but would be caught by any
reasonably competent
> human. Add in tons of duplicated lines, dangling
references (see figure
> below,
> when the figure is above) and logical
inconsistencies that someone should
have
> queried, and my conclusion is that no-one actually
read the damn thing at
the
> publishers after the initial draft.
>
> Whose responsibility would this be?
> In one of the Executioner novels, number
50-something (I won the first 140
> in a bulk lot on Ebay),
> at one point Mack Bolan gives his trusty Beretta to
a woman who needs
> protection. A few pages
> later, he gets ambushed, and the "trusty Beretta
Belle leaps into his hand
> and spits fire into the night."
> Or some such horseshit. Later, when the arch-villain
is about to shoot
> our trusty hero, the woman--the
> villain's wife--shoots him with the Beretta that
Mack had given her
> earlier. Who should have found this
> logic flaw?
> The author, certainly, but for the post-Pendleton
Executioners, he's
> probably just a hack trying to
> make word-count and meet deadline. The editor? The
copy-editor? Well,
> in this case, no one did.
> My guess is there was no copy-editor, and the editor
didn't care because
he
> had to get out one book
> a month, and this was just hackwork anyway.
Obviously the readers don't
> care, because the Executioner
> is still going strong, some 300+ books into the
series.
>
> But I see these kinds of problems even at big-name
publishers, and I
> suspect the problem is the
> publisher, cutting back on production costs by
eliminating multiple drafts
> (with editorial
> commentary) and copy-editing.
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