And this piece of utter non sequitur (look it up) nonsense disproves your entire rant.
Horse shit (since you didn’t understand the regionalism).
Arguing that English spelling used to be a lot more flexible and thus ‘variant spellings’ today are a continuation of some noble march of change is not too different from longing for pre-Semmelweis medicine (look it up).
I agree (though there were a few purely-factual or grammatical errors, too). The money that would have been lost if any delay occurred, was certainly the overriding consideration.
Did the author’s reference source mean the Old Style year number (in those days, years were counted as starting on Lady Day, March 25th)?
I’ve mentioned it here before, but I read a book where there were two main female characters. Let’s call them Anna and Zoe. Anna was an author and Zoe a zoologist. Anna was involved with Andrew and Zoe with Zach.
Suddenly, half way through, Anna was the zoologist involved with Zach and Zoe was the author involved with Andrew.
Twenty page later, they switched back.
This was not a fantasy or sf novel!
There seem to be plenty of people who think it is fine to submit stuff to critique groups which have never been read for even obvious typos. And who think it is not worth their time to do so. One woman in the group my wife is in justifies this by saying it is “a first draft.” But then the same crap is in the published (self-published, of course) book. And she wonders why they don’t sell.
Once more: Spelling regularization is a fashion, not an improvement in knowledge. People spelling differently from you, even inconsistently, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re less educated and it damned sure doesn’t mean they’re less intelligent.
I once bought a book on steganography (the art of hiding messaegs within some form of communication). They talked about flipping low-order bits of electronic images to include messages, since the low-order bits are less significant to the image and most display programs have error-correction algorithms to restore the bits to their original values.
Then they talked about intentional “errors” in text that could be used for the same purpose. From that point onward, I could not help noticing the frequent (too frequent?) textual errors (misspellings, omitted or extraneous character, etc.). That destroyed my enjoyment of the book, wondering what they were really trying to say.
Yeah, it’s both a spelling and grammatical error, but I characterize it as a spelling error. What sounds like “could of” and “should of” is perfectly fine when spoken. There’s no grammar problem with that construction. It’s when it’s transcribed into “could of” and “should of” instead of “could’ve” and “should’ve” where the error is introduced.
How are they pronounced differently? In my dialect, both are exactly the same.
Username/Post combo!
As a self-published author, I am very sensitive to the lack of editing present in most self-published works, but it’s a hard situation. Unless you are lucky enough to have friends or family willing to sit down and proof-read 100,000 words or more, you’re left with the choice of spending good money on an editor (and self-published authors generally don’t make that much, so that was right out the window for me) or basically just re-reading your own manuscript multiple times. The problem with that is, you wrote it so you know what’s coming and your brain fills in the gaps and mistakes so that you don’t always notice them.
Read it out loud. You’ll find a ton of errors that way.
Make a recording, if possible. Not to listen to, necessarily, but the act of recording will slow your reading.
I find different sets of errors reading aloud, reading from a screen and reading from paper. Reading aloud is more important to find clunky sentences and bad rhythm than to find typos for me, though it is good for finding typos also.
I’m thoroughly familiar with the argument, and I think it’s almost complete nonsense - on a par with most “well, They used to _____ and it worked just fine” arguments. I am absolutely not a proscriptivist (or however you spell that in French) and I am very conscious of language evolution over time, and even within my lifetime, and I am highly appreciative of artistic or clever use of language… but the best of the last doesn’t come from ignorance any more than not knowing how to draw makes someone an great artist. Very much a case of having to know the rules to break them intelligently.
You forgot to list all the famous, intelligent peeple hoo spellt lik shitt. Which is neither here nor there; poor spelling (as judged against standards) can be caused by many things unrelated to intelligence - dyslexia comes to mind and seems to have been proven or highly suspected in many bright folks.
But I maintain that being able to spell the basic English vocabulary correctly is both an asset and a sufficient line item on evaluation of literacy, intelligence, and suitability for any job, position or effort that requires written communication. Misspelling dispells clarity and can lead to mistakes when the misspelling is misinterpreted. Communication is difficult enough without adding in needless, sloppy, “artistic” personal variations, especially in anything like business, civic or commercial writing.
Short form: I in no way believe there is some absolute standard of spelling or that we have reached some final stage in the evolution of English. But there most certainly are standard ways to spell almost every word, especially those in the basic adult vocabulary and most certainly in the vocabulary of defined fields of study and effort. Failing to conform to this level of standardization does not have a valid supporting argument outside of the hallway between the Phil and English departments.
ETA: Especially in the era when most stuff is written with spell checkers - realtime and standalone - a keypress away. Writing a memo in Word full of “creative” spellings is just laziness.
I find it works for many things. But yes, those horrible meaningless sentences will leap out when read aloud.
You bring up a good point, too. Reading from a screen and reading from paper are two different things. Print and read things you want to be typo/error free. It helps.
Amateur Barbarian: The fact you know about dyslexia and persist in making your argument tells me all I need to know about your position.
An e-reader like the Kindle is a fairly good compromise. A Kindle really does have most of the advantages of real paper, although, of course, the screen size isn’t as big as a typical manuscript page.
I do most of my final proofing on a Kindle, and use it when proofing for other people’s work.
(The search function is a joy. Say that a character’s name changes – up to page 100 it’s Dr. Jones but after page 100 it’s Doctor Jones – the search function can tell you exactly where this happened. Very, very helpful!)
(Several typos were committed in the composition of this post.)
Are you saying “to” is a verb? :dubious:
I read the NYT bestseller One Second After which is all about the effects of an EMP attack. Throughout the book, the author used “should of” instead of “should have”. I don’t know how that happens.