Wanted: Proffreaders

I meant to do that. Was it annoying to read that? It was definitely annoying for me to type it and let it stand like that. But over the past several years, I've been noticing an increasing number of typos, wrong words and just plain errors cropping up in the books I read. Books from major publishers, not just tiny houses with stretched budgets or those that are part of the explosion of do-it-yourself print-to-order outfits.

Sometimes it's clear that someone has run spellcheck, but no more than that. I've seen feet instead of feat, bare instead of bear, tenant instead of tenet, cannon instead of canon. All words, but all nonsensical when placed where they don't belong. If I'm reading a work of fiction and I see a glaring error like that, it kicks me right out of the story. It's like seeing an extra in a crowd scene in Gladiator wearing a jeans, a t-shirt and a wristwatch, or seeing the trapdoor through which the Wicked Witch of the West descends, only partially hidden by her cloud of smoke. It's a short-circuit in the text-to-brain loop.

I've been a typesetter and proofreader, and I've seen manuscripts of varying degrees of legibility, but that's why they went through several different people before getting sent to the printer. Proofreading is expensive, both in-house and contracted, but the author put much time and care into producing the work, the least the publisher can do is make sure it is correct. Spellcheck isn't enough. It won't catch the wrong word, it might or might not catch an omitted word, and if the work concerns numbers or data in any form, spellcheck can't catch any of those errors. There is no substitute for a proofreader.

And of course, I just spent a very large span of time hunting for typos in this. It would be just my luck to goof up the word spellcheck. I'd never live it down.