ERROR! AN EDITOR’S NIGHTMARE

Before being the Editor – in – Chief of this site, I worked as a reporter for a weekly magazine. Hence, the previous as well as present experiences lead me to a conclusion that half of all errors that creep into print are owing to ignorance. Very rarely, it could also be because of deadline pressure. The rest? Carelessness and nothing but pure carelessness. It could be wrong spelling, wrong date, and wrong fact! It could also involve punctuation mistakes, grammatical mistakes, terminology/jargon mistakes etc.

Apart from the above reasons, many errors are also caused by words being sound-alikes.

For example: “At about one O’ clock, on Tuesday afternoon, before the Boeing crashed, a passenger had called his family informing them that something was wrong with their plain’s engine. Plain’s engine? Or perhaps plane’s engine!

Another example? Here it is: In August 2005, CNN.com provided an obituary on commentator Pete Jennings: Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather in a sense could have come out of the same shoot, but there was only one Petter Jennings.” A shoot? A shoot is a pastime for vice presidents; it is also a euphemistic expletive, dating from 1876, expressing frustration or disappointment. The correction? It is supposed to be, ‘the same chute.

Well, they are some trickers such as plane/plain, shoot/chute, and similarly cymbal/symbol, cornet/coronet, chanty/shanty and reign/ rein/ rain. They are technically known as ‘homophones’: two or more words that 1. Have different meanings, 2. Are spelled differently, and 3. Sound more or less alike. They are a bane, an utter nuisance to a copy editor’s life.

Copy editors work in a wide variety of fields–anywhere there is text. In academia, they may work for journals, universities, or independent academic clients. In publishing, they may work for newspapers, magazines, journals, book publishers, websites, online publishers, or individual writers. In the business and non – profit worlds, they can work as independent contractors freelancing for a variety of clients, at the clients’ offices or working from their own, or serve as partners or employees in specialized copywriting agencies that serve general business or non profit clients, or clients in specific industries such as technology, medicine, engineering, or the arts. Anywhere they work for that matter, the nightmare is same. Carelessness by the reporter! The copy editor is expected to ensure that the text flows, that it is sensible, fair, and accurate, and that it will provoke no legal problems for the publisher. Someone not trained in this area may pass by one or perhaps numerous of the mistakes mentioned above without noticing them.

But well, if you are a writer and there’s no one to be your copy editor, then simply follow this. Make the copy (i) clear, (ii) correct, (iii) concise, (iv) comprehensible, and (v) consistent; that is: make it say what it means, and mean what it says. The only advice I can offer all you writers is to develop a copy editor’s sixth sense: if a word looks wrong, believe me, it very probably is.