Martine77

@mgcrow · 12 Apr 2023

Follow Following

3 Reasons Why Modern Books Are Mistakes

I'm not going to talk about old books with outdated spelling, but I'm going to talk about more recent titles that will conform to current spelling standards. It's almost impossible to find an error-free book. I am going to list the three main reasons for this.

1) Word blindness

In principle, your brain knows what to say when you are reading/writing and that's why it sometimes misleads you.
Normally, a writer rewrites and reworks his work to its best point and then leave it to the editing and correction to continue working on it before publication.
You have such blind spots, especially in your own text, but editors also go through several rounds and you work with the same editor all the time, they also become familiar with the text and they also get the word blindness over.
That is also one reason why many mistakes go unnoticed by (trial) readers, especially if the story is engaging and you are immersed in it.

You can think of this as texts where the words are miswritten as an anagram but that you can still read, such as “your two words here the other day”

2) Costs

I mentioned in an earlier blog that editing and correction costs a lot of time and therefore a lot of money.
The better you want the book, the more rounds it takes to get the book in order. Some authors are also less proficient in language, so they need more editing. This includes authors with dyslexia or who write in a second language.

In her book “How to Write a Bestseller”, Maria Genova states that you need at least five rounds of editing to get a book almost error-free. Since you can expect this to cost at least 5000 euros, it is clear that few publishers are making that investment, especially for an unknown author, who they don't know if the book will work.

The correction usually happens at the end, when the story is over and has had the editorial rounds, because errors can creep in at every step.

3) Digitization

Last but not least: editing and correcting is now all done digitally. The time when someone else went through printed texts on paper with a red pen, then someone retyped it and literally went through the paper mill again, are long gone.

Nowadays, writing, editing and correcting all take place on screen, and even there, our eyes sometimes perceive things differently than on paper.
Even though the modern software offers benefits such as spelling and grammar control, they are no substitute for human eyes. For example, the computer does not understand the context of words and a jug and a comb can be confused. Or can you let women and children come first.

And then the software may not be able to do what it needs to do. For example, the proofreader may have corrected typos for an hour, but due to a glitch somewhere, it won't be stored as it should.

Nowadays, you can work with automatic storage, but that has both advantages and disadvantages.

#textcorrection #books #fouten #editorialstaff