Would it kill you to hire an editor?
Over the past several days, I've been reading a novel titled Zapatista by Blake Bailey. I received this book as a birthday present from a former student. (Mike and I share a birthday, as well as some political viewpoints and tastes in music, which has bound us together somewhat. Though I give books as gifts often, I'm a bit uncomfortable getting them; I feel an obligation to read them, and I already have quite a backlog of books to read.) The novel is about an aspiring
American writer who gets caught up in the Chiapas Indian uprising/revolution in southern Mexico in 1994. It's an adventure story, though the facts of the uprising are supposedly presented accurately. The book was okay, but I had a huge problem getting involved in it due to the overwhelming amount of errors in the book. When I read a professionally published novel, I'm not surprised to find an ocassional grammatical mistake or two, usually a missing or misused comma, but certainly no more than a couple. This book had glaring mistakes every ten pages or so, on average. Things like "their" instead of "they're", "it's" instead of "its" and "past" instead of "passed." These are the kinds of mistakes I expect to find in my students' writing, and hopefully I'm able to correct them, so that at least some of them learn from it. But not in a novel.
American writer who gets caught up in the Chiapas Indian uprising/revolution in southern Mexico in 1994. It's an adventure story, though the facts of the uprising are supposedly presented accurately. The book was okay, but I had a huge problem getting involved in it due to the overwhelming amount of errors in the book. When I read a professionally published novel, I'm not surprised to find an ocassional grammatical mistake or two, usually a missing or misused comma, but certainly no more than a couple. This book had glaring mistakes every ten pages or so, on average. Things like "their" instead of "they're", "it's" instead of "its" and "past" instead of "passed." These are the kinds of mistakes I expect to find in my students' writing, and hopefully I'm able to correct them, so that at least some of them learn from it. But not in a novel.
posted by Kootch | 12:48 AM
4 Comments:
Or at least learn how to use "Spell-check".
But what good is a library if you've read all the books?
Most of those errors mentioned by Kootch would not be "caught" by a spell-check program. I think that the problem is that too many people rely on "Spell Check."
.The more sophisticaed "spelll checks" actia;;u dp catcj errprs om grammer as well
I tell my students not to depend on the "grammar check" part of spell check on our school computers. About half the time, it tells you the wrong thing. Often a correct use of grammar will be stated as wrong, and vice versa. If they want a better source, I tell 'em to ask me.
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