Me, too.
Thank you for this thread. I’m glad there’s still a remnant of us who care about such things.
One of my pet peeves is the random hyphenation which now seems to be the standard. I remember being taught that if you needed to split a word at the end of a line you did so between two syllables of the word. Now people just split the word wherever they want, with no regard to making sense of it. As an example, I recently saw “hemis-phere”.
That’s no standard but people who don’t understand hyphenation.
At least that’s better than hemisp-here
From hemisp-here to hemisp-there.
About 30 years ago, I was a correspondent for a morning daily in a small-to-medium sized city. Although there were two editors reviewing my work, I had a knack for self-editing and rarely were my stories edited to any great degree. That paper had dozens of reporters covering various beats, with editors and proofreaders assigned to each beat. And then, the paper was sold to Gannett. Today they have fewer than 20 people in the entire newsroom. Reporters are now their own editors and proofreaders. Those are three different talents. See the problem?
By comparison, I’m retired from a local TV station in the same market that employs 60 or 70 reporters, editors, writers and producers in the newsroom. There are checks and balances galore. Grammatical errors are rare, and they are usually when someone has mis-typed a graphic. And people coming out of school want to work in TV. Nobody wants to be a print journalist. It’s sad that newspapers have become irrelevant, but many still haven’t learned how to do it online and make money at it.
I’ve made my living for 50+ years using the English language, spoken and written, and couldn’t diagram a sentence (or define a “gerund”) if my life depended on it. I’d love to do freelance editing or proofreading, but those gigs are hard to find. I still have the AP Style Book in my library, however, just in case.
A lot of people who don’t understand hyphenation. I would say that about 95% of the hyphenation I see is incorrect.
Was there really a factual question here?
Anyway, one of my friends is a professional editor via contract. However, she has been complaining business is off.
That’s almost surely just a bad hyphenation algorithm. I use a program (TeX) that really takes hyphenation seriously and almost never gets it wrong. One problem is that two words can be spelled the same but pronounced and hyphenated differently. A mathematician and a chemist will hyphenate “equivalent” differently.
One aspect is that modern alignment and justification algorithms have made hyphenation less necessary. So it makes sense to me that people are bad at it.
That said, with all the dictionaries of words we have, it shouldn’t be hard to have lists of words separated by syllable for use in automated hyphenation systems. There’s no reason it should be guessing where the syllable boundary is, as (surprise) English is irregular there, too. (For example, hemis-phere* makes sense in that it splits consonant sounds up between syllables. But English will often split by morpheme instead, with the prefix hemi- plus the base word sphere.)
As for the main topic: I suspect it has to do with the Internet competing with traditional edited media. It makes sense that newspapers, for example, cut editing staff before they cut their writers.
In online media, there’s the fact errors need not be permanent anymore. I suspect this lessens the impact of proofreading errors. There is already a natural pressure to release content quickly, but now there is less pressure to get it right the first time.
It’s like what has happened with video games. Content is now seen as being able to constantly updated. And you can outsource your bugtesting or proofreading to your audience.
InDesign hyphenates it that way (bad algorithm). I added it to our user dictionary to hyphenate correctly.
Computerized spelling dictionaries certainly do indicate hyphenation points, or at least some that I’ve seen do.
I’m constantly getting notifications from LinkedIn about editing jobs, many of them freelance and remote. So there are some jobs out there. I think the pay tends to be pretty terrible, however.
Yeah, all kinds of editors are still working. I don’t know much about newspapers, but I have seen a lot of errors on the websites. I assume that once upon a time, writers had to get their stories in before the next edition, which gave a minute for somebody to look it over. But these days, they have to get their stories in before the next update to the website, which is likely RIGHT NOW, so any edits happen after the piece has already been posted.
For literature, there is a disturbing trend in the self-publishing industry of not using any sort of editor. And I get it, editors are expensive and you’ll probably never recoup your expenses if you hire a professional. But at least grab a journalism major from a local college and give them 20 bucks to look over your book.
Related to that is the growing tendency by writers from all walks to rely on software to edit their manuscripts. So if the book you’re reading sounds just like the last two books you read (including the same errors in the same places), it’s a safe bet that all of those writers relied on Grammarly. Machines are not editors, people–pass it on!
It really bugs me to see these typos because I know there must be others I don’t catch.
A few weeks ago I got “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” from the library because I couldn’t find my old copy. IIRC it was the same publisher and decent paper. I noticed 2 typos. One was “warm” which from context should’ve been “warn”. The second was something like "Western ears can’t hear the difference between the Hindu letters da, da, and dha. I noticed that particular typo, because I distinctly remember from the original that the second “da” had a single dot above the “a”.
A year or two ago I got “1984” from the library. It was a new copy, but a cheap edition. It looked like they got a text copy from the Internet, dumped it into Word, and printed it like that. The chapter headings all appeared with the word “Chapter” at the left margin and the chapter number at the right margin. IIRC other spots got the same treatment.
Around 10 years ago I wrote an article for a reference series, Dictionary of Literary Biography. The editor returned my draft with a dozen proofreadings and queries, which I addressed. Then, when the print copy appeared, there was a huge typo that I wasn’t responsible for: some ignoramus “corrected” the author’s place of burial, listed as X Cemetery, and put in “Cematary” instead. I was so disgusted and mortified, (and still am) that it destroyed all my pleasure in what’s otherwise a solid entry.
Back in the 1990s, I prepared a special edition magazine for the American Chamber of Commerce of Indonesia, to celebrate 50 years of Indonesian independence. At that time I was the executive director of the chamber. The head of Freeport (a huge mining company based in Louisiana, with significant gold and copper mining interests in Papua) was president. In certain circles in Jakarta, Freeport was a Big Deal.
I personally checked all the digital files before I turned them over to the printing company and to the best of my ability the copy was free of errors. The printer didn’t provide proofs for me to initial, however, and I was too new to the world of publishing in those days to demand them.
One of the graphics in the magazine was a map of the United States. Each state was labeled, mostly with abbreviations (like “NY” instead of “New York”) because there was not enough space to spell out the full name.
Louisiana, home to Freeport, was thus labeled “LA” because the full name of the state was too long to fit in the available space.
A brilliant soul at the printing company saw “LA” and said, “hey, we can spell that out if we put the words on two lines!”
So the US map was printed with the state of Louisiana marked as:
Los
Angeles
I was pissed but didn’t do anything about it (I was younger then). If that happened on my watch today I’d make the printing company redo the print run at no cost. You can just imagine how stupid the US map looked.
Luckily, the Freeport people had a sense of humor and I didn’t get in (much) trouble for the mistake.
Heh, welcome to old fartdom!
The Chicago Tribune published a lot of typos in the mid-70s. My father was bothered enough to write to the editors, enclosing an article in which he’d circled all the mistakes.
My GF is an editor. A really good one too (and she does not read this board so this is not me sucking-up).
So, I know at least one still exists.
She often laments the lack of editors these days. As news agencies look to save money editors seem the first to go.
Good editors can make an important difference, I think.
The Guardian, one of England’s leading newspapers, has a long-standing reputation for being prone to typos and scrambled letters - up to the point of earning itself the nickname “The Grauniad”. They seem to have grown quite fond of that moniker themselves. The usual explanation for the high frequency of spelling mistakes in the paper is that it is produced in Manchester and thus had to be rushed so that the hard copy editions would make it in time to newsstands in the London area.