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Thread: Proof, proof, proof

  1. #16
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    [sigh]

    Quote Originally Posted by Lee Schierer View Post
    ...I notice that some authors either can't spell or their proof readers/ editors need to go back to school....
    It gets worse every year as authors become their own editors. When I told my wife about this thread she laughed out loud.

    My Lovely Bride was a professional proofreader then an editor then a top manager in the scientific/technical publications field. We have collaborated on many things since I bought the very first version of Pagemaker for the orig IBM PC and a laser printer in 1987. She went on to a career in words while I made my career largely in graphics and images, both still and moving.

    We have both lamented over the years at how the increasing access to personal word processing, presentation software, graphics software, digital cameras, and now self-publishing has resulted in deplorably lowered standards in both print, presentation, and video. Now that everyone can be author/proofreader/editor/illustrator/photographer/video producer there is no need to hire a professional at all. Those who do get professional results. Everyone else ends up with quality no higher than the level of their personal capabilities. Unfortunately, it is a rare person who can do it all well.

    Yikes, I didn't get her to proof this. Oh well.

    JKJ

  2. #17
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jim Koepke View Post
    It is possible to edit a Facebook post? Please tell me more.
    It's always been possible to edit a Facebook post...click on the little dots in the upper right corner of your post (whether you are the OP or are making a comment to someone else's post) and click on "edit"...you may need to hover your pointer for the three dots to appear. FB does mark your posts as "edited" after changing them, too.
    Last edited by Jim Becker; 11-27-2017 at 9:26 AM.
    --

    The most expensive tool is the one you buy "cheaply" and often...

  3. #18
    auto correct doesn't change my words until I hit the space at the end of the word, so a word spelled correctly, isn't changed until after I have moved on to the next word. Extremely aggravating to say the least. Even more infuriating, is that sometimes it will let a word go just fine and change it in a later post. Worse yet, in some subjects with peculiar terminology, it will note the spelling as inaccurate but leave it intact and also later change the spelling. For instance, after about 300 times that I have spelled the word, "frizzen" is still notes the word as misspelled. I used the word "Cultch" yesterday and I thought I would go crazy getting it to stop changing the word. I tried to type the word "graupel" (a type of frozen precipitation) once and by the reaction, I expected the phone to burn up. even the spell check on my computer is telling me the word is spelled wrong, yet I know it isn't.

  4. #19
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    I don't facebook, but I do text a bit, and I use the 'talk to text' on my phone. It often makes mistakes on words I speak. Maybe it is the same on facebook?
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  5. #20
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    I always proof read what I write. Quite often, I find grammar and spelling mistakes I have made when writing or responding to a post. I HATE "autocorrect" on my smart phone. Literally hate it. It makes far more mistakes than I do.
    Ken

    So much to learn, so little time.....

  6. #21
    I had a wonderful teacher that drilled it into us that "If you can't send it out right, don't send it out at all." and really instilled proofing and double-checking our work. Once in the workforce, it was a hard pill to swallow when management forced us to ship out faulty software to hundreds of businesses knowing we would have to send out replacements in a few weeks once it was proofed and debugged.

    I'm with the others above. It drives me nuts when I proof something on my smartphone and then when I press SEND it changes the text on me! It was correct before I hit SEND!!!!
    I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and I think, "Well, that’s not going to happen."

  7. #22
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    As far as I know, you can turn Autocorrect off on any device that uses it. I don't use it on my Android phone, my iPads, or other tablets. It is evil. Just google "autocorrect fails".

    JKJ

  8. #23
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jim Becker View Post
    Ole, a lot of folks post from SmartPhones and "Autocorrect" quite often does a number on things when folks are typing with their thumbs...and as you note, they rarely read things before hitting "post". And many folks don't realize that one can go back and edit out errors, too...
    I ran a BBS for 14 years before the Inet came around, and saw the same terrible grammer/spelling back then. Smartphones is no excuse for people spelling so bad.
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  9. #24
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    Quote Originally Posted by Myk Rian View Post
    I ran a BBS for 14 years before the Inet came around, and saw the same terrible grammer/spelling back then. Smartphones is no excuse for people spelling so bad.
    No disagreement with it not being an excuse. I was just pointing out part of the reason this happens in current times relative to technology...
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  10. #25
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    I, like Lee, having retired, am reading much more than I used to. I have found the scientific and history books I read and the older books on my shelf are much more professionally published than the novels. I guess that shouldn't surprise me.

  11. #26
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    Self-editing has unfortunately become a lot more common in fiction because self-publishing is about the only way for many authors to actually get published these days. And the issue with self-editing is that one is so familiar with the material that even simple grammatical (and sometimes spelling) issues pass right by the author's eyes because they are just so familiar with the writing. Almost everything I read these days is from authors who are faced with that. They are great writers and have wonderful stories and series, but the economics of it all have sometimes hurt in the details.
    --

    The most expensive tool is the one you buy "cheaply" and often...

  12. #27
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jim Becker View Post
    Self-editing has unfortunately become a lot more common in fiction because self-publishing is about the only way for many authors to actually get published these days. And the issue with self-editing is that one is so familiar with the material that even simple grammatical (and sometimes spelling) issues pass right by the author's eyes because they are just so familiar with the writing. Almost everything I read these days is from authors who are faced with that. They are great writers and have wonderful stories and series, but the economics of it all have sometimes hurt in the details.
    There's another phenomenon I've seen with older authors (i.e. those whose books were originally published as, well, books) where the ebook edition is just plain horrible. My suspicion is that whoever currently owns the publishing rights just does an OCR scan of the hardcopy and stuffs it through a format converter to get a quick-and-dirty Kindle version...emphasis on "dirty". There are some where the author (or direct heirs) is still alive and everything is being handled by his/her "real" publisher, and those seem to be more or less ok. The real problem is dead authors whose book rights have changed hands multiple times and are no longer controlled by anyone who cares about the source material.
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  13. #28
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lee DeRaud View Post
    ...The real problem is dead authors whose book rights have changed hands multiple times and are no longer controlled by anyone who cares about the source material.
    What do they care about then? Just money? Nooooo....

    I've seen some really horrible ebooks and agree with your suspicion. Another problem is probably software. I get three SciFi periodicals on my Kindle - these are generated from the digital files they use to print the current paper editions so they should be right. However, I often see duplicated sentences, terrible handling of hyphens, and problems with white space between within stories.

    JKJ

  14. #29
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    (Yoda voice) "Amusing thread is this."

    Part of it is, as noted, technology. I had the fortunate experience as a yute of writing a LOT of papers for assorted English classes during junior and senior high school. Using typewriters. One reason I wrote so many papers is because I was always in the advanced English classes, largely the result of being a voracious reader. So, not only did I get lots and lots of work on grammar, the memory of a Ten Sentence Analysis still makes me shudder, but I also experienced the pain of having to retype entire pages due to errors. I learned to proof read.

    I rarely, or more accurately, extremely rarely post anything from a phone. As someone who once could type 90wpm, the smartphone interface drives me nuts, so I don't use 'em to post.

    All of that as background, I can agree with the OP that there are some posts (whether on a forum or social media) that are so terribly written that the first thing I do is check to see if the poster is likely using some translation engine. If the post looks like there may be some value, I'll ask for clarification. If not, then I'll move on. For lesser "challenges", I try to be charitable. If I can figure out what they're attempting to say, then I'll respond based on that. Of course, some folks do make it difficult to be charitable, in which case I may go full on grammar nazi / spelling commie.

    There is a second aspect to this, namely the "democratization" of mass communication. Once upon a time, the vast majority of what we read had been through the various editors and proofreaders and such. Now, not so much. While it's very distressing to see "professional" writers churning out badly spelled ungrammatical dreck (sp??), a great many of the people we're reading now never aspired to be nor claim to be professional / skilled writers. 'Tis a two-edged sword. We get to read a lot that we'd never have encountered before, and some of it we dearly wish we never encounter again.
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  15. #30
    I also sometimes wonder whether teachers at the elementary and high school level enforce the accuracy of spelling and grammar in the way they did when many of us were that age. Maybe not, especially in our current system of standardized multiple choice tests.

    Poor spelling and grammar can be annoying to the reader, but the real loser is the writer. At best, errors may have no consequence, but usually it reflects poorly on the writer. Rightly or wrongly, the words that come to mind are sloppy, lazy, uneducated, hasty. These are not the descriptors upon which to build in an increasingly competitive world.

    In discussion forums and Facebook posts where there is a degree of informality you can cut some slack, but when you see poor spelling and grammar making it's way into professional documents, published work, journalism, etc., it's kind of depressing.

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