Today we see that the time saving of using find-and-replace can be a false economy.
What I gleaned about the stories: Some people are aware of food having flavours that they can’t describe. This is probably a metaphor for a greater insight.
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Note: This is a short story collection, so the rules are slightly different from standard Immerse or Die: instead of reading on every time I lose immersion, I stop reading that story and move on to the next one. As usual, I stop reading after the third WTF.
Analysis: The ‘all-rights reserved’ declaration is followed by the sentence:
‘For permission requests, write to the publisher, adDr.essed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the email adDr.ess below.’
A single typographical error before I am into a book stands out, so two on the copyright page filled me with a feeling of dread that almost made me give up without reading on. While not everyone will read the copyright page, the class of readers who do will contain a high number of people who really care about accurate language, so – even ignoring issues of law – this is a painful error.
To make it worse, the book opens on the cover not the body. I prefer to start from the cover, so would usually consider this a saving of the flick needed to go to the cover, but in this instance it ensures that every reader will see the copyright page. So even those who don’t usually read the front matter might catch sight of the error in passing.
Analysis: The first story opens with:
‘There are five tastes, or is it six? Salty, sweet, spicy, bitter—mint? Is mint a taste? No. But what about that Asian taste? The cheese taste, meat taste—the taste of blood. Not quite salty, but full and bold.’
This immediately gave me a strong image of the narrator. I not only got a solid feel for their voice, I know that they know a little about food, but don’t take it too seriously and they like mint. The little, potentially irrelevant, detail of liking mint made them feel more like a real person.
Analysis: A few paragraphs into the first story I encountered:
‘Condensation on his water glass Dr.ipped similar to the saliva on the roof of his mouth as he watched waiters in tuxedo shirts and black pants carry large husks of meat and carving knives.’
I am more forgiving of a complex sentence than some readers, so this slightly bulky simile might not have tripped me usually. However, the capital and full stop in ‘Dr.ipped’ befuddled my sentence parsing enough that I thought it was the several sentences an editor might recommend, but couldn’t fit them together.
By the time I realised it was a single sentence, the momentum that might have got me past its complexity was gone. So I moved on.
Analysis: At the end of the first line of the second story I hit ‘adDr.essed’. While readers of this report might have already noticed the pattern, this was the moment I noticed every instance of ‘dr’ in the book was rendered ‘Dr.’
As I hadn’t noticed any other errors, I wondered if it were a deliberate effect and flipped back to the start of the book. I couldn’t find any immediate sign of why it might be.
I also realised an uncontrolled find-and-replace carried when the author discovered a lower case ‘Dr.’ while proofing was a much more likely cause.
Back at the start of the book, with the expectation I would keep having the same niggle pushed at me, I pulled the plug.
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‘Condensation on his water glass Dr.ipped similar to the saliva on the roof of his mouth as he watched waiters in tuxedo shirts and black pants carry large husks of meat and carving knives.’
‘Husks’ of meat? Should than have been ‘hunks’ do you suppose?
The final final proofread is something that should never be overlooked. If proof were ever needed, this is it!
Hunks would make more sense.
When writing several of my IoD reports, I have noticed further issues in passages that I didn’t notice at the time. Which would seem to suggest that each potential speed bump doesn’t just a risk losing a reader’s attention, but also risks a reader spotting other things they would otherwise have missed.
I noticed that with my writing group too. Almost no one finds the same set of errors, because the eye and mind jump as they read. The more errors, however, the greater the chance the reader will focus on it and throw them out. Strange punctuation and capitalization almost always gets readers though, because it breaks the visual pattern.
Just found your blog. That was a Microsoft Word find and replace disaster, as you guessed. Updated the book to fix those errors a while back. Another lesson? Don’t rush. It would have taken me maybe ten minutes to fix the original error. Instead I rushed the fix, and ended up costing myself almost two hours to fix the Dr. error.
There’s an argument for saving a version of your book before every change. Of course, that takes both a huge hard drive and remembering to save all the time; so most people compromise then get bitten.
The aim of the reports is to highlight the things that can cause readers to give up; so, hopefully your pain will save another author the same “going through their book with tweezers” struggle.