Readers-?

[marvholly]

Is anyone else noticing BIG errors in grammar, continuity and/or spelling in the books they are reading. I read mostly new fiction, mysteries or action/adventure – generally 4-6 books/week. There has been a major increase in these things in the past year or so.

I am NOT talking about the placement of commas & colons or even the breach of the rule to never end a sentence in a preposition. This type of thing has MUCH changed over the last 25 years and especially in the last 5 or so.

Do publishers no longer employ proof readers?  I am almost ready to volunteer.

[bobosensei]

I suspect a lot of the books you are reading are self published by the author.  It is so easy to do with kindle, and if you are paying to publish your own book to get your first break you might skimp (or entirely skip) on the editing to save money.  I tend to notice these kinds of mistakes most in memoir type books- like the people that write about their experience hiking the Appalachian Trail and less so with established authors that use the big publishing companies.

[milee]

Years ago when I got the first Kindle, the e-books had huge, glaring errors. I suspect many of the errors were due to nobody fully proofing the product created by an automated translation technology.  In the books I read, the e-book errors have decreased over the past few years.  I suspect that's due to the growing popularity of e-books and the fact that most are simultaneously published in that format as well as print. 

But it still bugs me that they still struggle with how to include maps, graphs, tables and other nonstandard print into an easily read e-book form.

[teen persuasion]

In ebooks, yes.  In print, not much, but I read ebooks much more than print these days.  I'm reading a lot of the free ebooks, so I assume they are self published, and yes, I want to offer to proof them for the authors!

One I debated getting the other day - tons of reviews mentioning a major formatting error (whole sections repeated), but the author had apologized and claimed it was fixed (no idea how it happened, my copy was fine...).  There were still repeated sections!  Wouldn't you make sure it was perfect after that?

[NoNamePerson]

Geeze, just go to MSN home page for all the misspelled words you want. I actually sent them a feedback because they had spelled Mardi Gras as Marti Gras. It did get corrected within 45 minutes to my surprise but how hard can it be to proof your 8 line article and headline?

Apparently it is very hard  

Oh and I'm not proofing this    I don't get paid big bucks to write for the internet!!

[Tennesseer]

Misspelled words in television news ticker feeds annoy me.

[NoNamePerson]

May 30, 2015 7:45:56 GMT -5 Tennesseer said:

Misspelled words in television news ticker feeds annoy me.

Or worse yet, a sentence that doesn't even make sense - and it scrolls over and over. You would think someone would notice and correct it.

[flamingo]

May 30, 2015 7:52:31 GMT -5 NoNamePerson said:

May 30, 2015 7:45:56 GMT -5 Tennesseer said:

Misspelled words in television news ticker feeds annoy me.

Or worse yet, a sentence that doesn't even make sense - and it scrolls over and over. You would think someone would notice and correct it.

This really annoys me. At the gym I go to, they have tvs on each machine. I usually watch a news station with a scrolling news ticker so that I listen to my music and "read" the news. Every.single.time there is an error! Drives me bonkers!

On the other hand, it gives me something to focus on for the 30 minutes or so I'm on the dreaded machine. Helps keep me occupied and not thinking about the torture of being there 

[NoNamePerson]

May 30, 2015 8:12:10 GMT -5 flamingo said:

May 30, 2015 7:52:31 GMT -5 NoNamePerson said:

Or worse yet, a sentence that doesn't even make sense - and it scrolls over and over. You would think someone would notice and correct it.

This really annoys me. At the gym I go to, they have tvs on each machine. I usually watch a news station with a scrolling news ticker so that I listen to my music and "read" the news. Every.single.time there is an error! Drives me bonkers!

On the other hand, it gives me something to focus on for the 30 minutes or so I'm on the dreaded machine. Helps keep me occupied and not thinking about the torture of being there 

Or to look on the bright side - the madder it makes you the harder you work on the machine   I work like a demon when I'm mad  

[Deleted]

I have noticed a few in print material. Not enough to make me think it's an epidemic, but I can recall on occasion thinking briefly, i sprang for a hardback, at least it could have been edited correctly. 

[busymom]

There are frequent misspellings in the Sunday newspaper here. With all of the technology out there, even if they're too cheap to hire proofreaders, I can't believe they can't program their computers to fix mistakes.

[giramomma]

May 30, 2015 7:45:56 GMT -5 Tennesseer said:

Misspelled words in television news ticker feeds annoy me.

We had a pretty bad one a few months ago. Shots were fired near a mall. Instead, the news feed said "shits" were fired.

It took the folks at the news agency an hour to fix their website. I didn't have the heart to email them. I was laughing way too hard.

[Tennesseer]

May 30, 2015 13:07:35 GMT -5 giramomma said:

May 30, 2015 7:45:56 GMT -5 Tennesseer said:

Misspelled words in television news ticker feeds annoy me.

We had a pretty bad one a few months ago. Shots were fired near a mall. Instead, the news feed said "shits" were fired.

It took the folks at the news agency an hour to fix their website. I didn't have the heart to email them. I was laughing way too hard.

That is pretty darn bad. I would have wanted to get a screen shot of that and post it on the Internet.

[debthaven]

We had a HUGE billboard here a couple of years ago, for a major event. The name of the VENUE was misspelled! DH and I were aghast. The posters were taken down. Guess what, they reappeared two weeks later, with the same error! 

I have a Masters in Print Journalism (but I reincarnated as a teacher 6 years ago). DH is a graphic designer who works with a huge variety of international organizations. 

Years ago, EVERYBODY hired proofreaders / editors. Now, NOBODY does. DH's clients ALL tell him, oh, Hans from Germany wrote this, his English is good enough, everybody will understand it. So DH edits the stuff for free. 

There are mistakes / typos is literally EVERYTHING I read today. It's shameful, but what can you do?! 

My guess is that the publishing houses either still employ proofreaders, or still have people whose job includes proofreading. But these people must be VERY overworked, so the work is done badly, and they miss things (and sometimes a LOT of things, depending on the place). 

ETA: The bottom line is, print has very little value anymore. 

[teen persuasion]

Many of the errors I see are homophone errors, or near homophones.  I wonder how much of it is caused by technology such as autocorrect and predictive typing.  I have to keep an eye on what ends up on here when using my kindle - it wants to change things on me all the time.  I had to force it to display "homophone" - it wanted to use "homophobe" instead.  I like to read historical fiction, and the ones that really drive me crazy are rein/reign, discreet/discrete.  Don't write historical fiction if you don't know the difference between a horse and a king!

The other errors I am seeing lately are missing words:  a, an, the, my, I, and the like.  Those just feel like things were rushed, and no one re-read it, but when the author thanks her editor and proofer and 3 or 4 family members who said she had a good story I have to wonder how it is possible that ALL of them missed the multiple errors I found so glaring.

[thyme4change]

May 30, 2015 5:24:40 GMT -5 marvholly said:

Is anyone else noticing BIG errors in grammar, continuity and/or spelling in the books they are reading. I read mostly new fiction, mysteries or action/adventure – generally 4-6 books/week. There has been a major increase in these things in the past year or so.

I am NOT talking about the placement of commas & colons or even the breach of the rule to never end a sentence in a preposition. This type of thing has MUCH changed over the last 25 years and especially in the last 5 or so.

Do publishers no longer employ proof readers?  I am almost ready to volunteer.

I noticed that it seems like every online article I read has at least one glaring mistake, and since then I have gone out of my way to note each article.  Even quality publications have wrong words that make a sentence ridiculous, or a word that changes the meaning of the thought.  It drives me crazy.  Can't these online news sites have the rule where you exchange your paper with the student next to you for proofreading??

[marvholly]

Bobo
WRONG. None of the books were self published. All from MAJOR publishing houses since that is all my local library buys & that is where I get all my books

Milee
Not ebooks. Hardcovers & paperbacks