When proofreaders go missing: a blog of errors, designed to demonstrate why sub-editors and copy editors remain important, at a time when they are increasingly regarded as optional extras (all contributions welcome; to follow on Twitter - zmkc)
Tuesday, 9 November 2010
Sydney Morning Herald, 9th November, 2010
What is worse than a sub who doesn't check? A sub who does check but doesn't know anything - presumably someone looked up Prussia in the atlas and couldn't find it and therefore decided it didn't exist and never had:
Pants - very inelegant (although not actually wrong, surely? I can imagine some nervous inexperienced copy editor scrambling their brains trying to decide if that "'s" was necessary - and the journal might even have a style book that told him it was and he might have just endured a scalding from a senior copy editor who regularly yells at the juniors that they should !@#$%*ing follow the @#$%(*ing style book as if it were the @#$%*^)$(@ing Bible.)
:-) I guess it's a failure of style rather than of logic. (I used to spell the possessive pronoun "its" with an apostrophe because it's the genitive, innit.)
Hi
ReplyDeleteI've just come over from Still Life with Cat where the misuse of the apostrophe was being discussed.
My contribution - from The New York Review of Books (no less),
'the series's creators'.
xxx
Pants
Pants - very inelegant (although not actually wrong, surely? I can imagine some nervous inexperienced copy editor scrambling their brains trying to decide if that "'s" was necessary - and the journal might even have a style book that told him it was and he might have just endured a scalding from a senior copy editor who regularly yells at the juniors that they should !@#$%*ing follow the @#$%(*ing style book as if it were the @#$%*^)$(@ing Bible.)
ReplyDelete:-) I guess it's a failure of style rather than of logic. (I used to spell the possessive pronoun "its" with an apostrophe because it's the genitive, innit.)
ReplyDeleteWhere did you put the apostrophe?
ReplyDeleteit's
ReplyDelete