Prooofing and Editting

This winter I've enjoyed reviewing some books for BookPleasures.com. Authors and publishers seeking reviews of works can contact Norm Goldman at the web site and request one. He relays the request to his reviewers to see who has time and interest, and the book is sent there. My experience has highlighted a problem - the importance of mechanical correctness.

When I was a student, that was a high priority, and was sometimes emphasized more than literary creativity. So years later, when I became acquainted with the concept of whole language instruction of students and the notion that kids be taught to worry about creative content first and to clean up the mechanics afterward, I applauded the idea. Naysayers said that students had to learn the rules, had to put them first. I argued that a balance was important.

Now I'm seeing material roll off the presses with lots of errors--wrong words, wrong spellings, wrong or missing punctuation, lots of mechanical stuff that should have been caught. As a self-published author, I know how easy it is to let this happen (and have contributed to the pile of "wrongs" myself). Having now reviewed three works that were decent books filled with typos and worse, any ambivalence I've had about the importance of mechanical correctness is gone. I'm rededicated to cleaning up my errors before publication meets public eye. Stumbling across typos in a good read is like biting down on a grain of sand in a great spinach salad. It's bone-jarring and distracts from the content. Creative genius deserves better!

So I'm going out on a limb here. Let me know when you find errors on my blog, and I'll correct them. But feel free, too, to focus on content and add your two cents.

And have a great day.