How did the editor miss this? Finding content errors in well-known books.

Yes they do exist. I love the Maximum Ride series by James Patterson, but couldn't understand why these kids that were genetically altered, grew up in hostile environments, never had weapons? I think these happen because things just do. I have read many books with errors in them. As a reader, I skip it and read on if it's a good story.

Yes.

I'd add that I don't blame using spell check so much as no longer proofing in hard copy. I also note, as someone who worked on Microlytics dictionaries, that there are mistakes in the corpora. Some are genuine mistakes, some are the fingerprints of smart-ass programmers.

Regarding spell check, I found my nephew had been adding his misspelled words to the spell checker's dictionary. He thought his variations were acceptable. Yet another reason no one touches my laptop but me.

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In response to RevisionIsTheKey, when I read The Lovely Bones, my thought throughout the book was "An elbow?" Of course, I'm clueless on the bones in the body, but somehow if she had said leg bone, arm bone, toe...I would have not stopped short each time she said "elbow." But I guess it was only a few of us since it had to go through editing, etc.

There is not one book, though, that I can honestly say everything checked out--grammar, spelling, content. Best seller or not, they all contain some mistake or two. Unfortunately, it does make the reader stop short.


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The words used in the DooM novels totally make me chortle. He's not that bright, he's a space marine, yet he knows words like ersatz, mulligatawny and enervated. Fun fact, he didn't know the word eldrich.

A few years ago my son found an error in a non-fiction picture book (by a very popular, well-regarded author in that genre). It said that Benjamin Franklin's famous letters written secretly to his brother's newspaper were signed "Silence Dogwood." It should have been "Silence Dogood." The mistake occurred both times the name was mentioned. I suspect spell-check may have contributed to the error.

Sad to say, a teacher I know (the author's books are classroom favorites) thought "Dogwood" was correct. I'm sure elementary school kids learning about Franklin for the first time would have thought the same.

Medievalist said:

Yes.

I'd add that I don't blame using spell check so much as no longer proofing in hard copy. I also note, as someone who worked on Microlytics dictionaries, that there are mistakes in the corpora. Some are genuine mistakes, some are the fingerprints of smart-ass programmers.

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This makes sense. I'm often surprised by the words my word processor's dictionary doesn't know. I used to second-guess myself; now I just break out my big fat red dictionary and prove the machine wrong and gleefully tell it that I'm smarter than it.

But if it's just a programmer messing with my precious words--argh!

(Spoilers for The Lovely Bones, obviously.)

veinglory said:

Also an "elbow" could mean to bones connected bu cartilege and sinew at the elbow with the long bones broken off. It seems fine to me.

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I read a discussion on the book, and not the book. I would have let the elbow thing go, if the body was chopped into pieces and this piece remained intact enough for the dog to take home. What got me was the logic error--supposedly the dog never had access to any part of the body as it was shut into a safe which was dropped down a well or other very deep hole in the ground miles from where the dog ever was. Unless someone can explain such a glaring error I have no patience with the book or the author.

benbradley said:

Long ago I read an article by Larry Niven, he mentioned that a first printing of "Ringworld" might be valuable because me mistakenly describes the Earth turning the wrong way (ISTR this was about "the game" in which SF readers look for scientific errors in published SF stories).

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Heh, heh, back in the day Ray Bradbury smacked a kid for this and never got busted for assault!

Here's a little quote from his section of the book Mars and the Mind of Man. "You see, nine-year-old boys are always finding me out. A few years back, one dreadful boy ran up to me and said: 'Mr. Bradbury?' 'Yes?' I said. 'That book of yours, The Martian Chronicles?' he said. 'Yes,' I said. 'On page 92, where you have the moons of Mars rising in the East?' 'Yeah,' I said. 'Nah,' he said. So I hit him. I'll be damned if I'll be bullied by bright children. Needless to say, I've never revised The Martian Chronicles based on new information given me by young boys."

RevisionIsTheKey said:

I just read the discussion of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones and someone brought up the dog bringing back the dead girl's elbow. The poster wondered how a dog could bring back an elbow because it's really just a location, a space where two bones meet. It made me think of something I noticed in Jodi Picault's Nineteen Minutes. At one point, someone goes to the neighbor's house to borrow gasoline. The neighbor is a retired fireman. Where does he keep his gasoline? In the basement, of course. Doesn't that go against Fire Safety 101?

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Mistakes happen. Writers, editors etc. are just people, and although they should pick up all the errors, they do miss them sometimes.

Just look at the mistake in your post...

jfreedan said:

Now wait a second, maybe the author's manuscript was correct and the editor changed it? You have no idea what the manuscript looked like before it got to the editor.

I also think it's presumptuous to assume it's solely the writers fault, especially when it is the editor's job is to catch all the mistakes and correct them. Maybe the writer did make a mistake but so did the editor. They don't get a "it's the authors fault" cop out when they are paid to make sure those mistakes aren't there.

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There seems to be a very consistent misunderstanding here about what an editor does. They don't go in, fix your manuscript for you, then send it back and say "here, all better." No. They mark it up and make corrections, and then send those corrections back to the author to IMPLEMENT.

To make it even simpler: The editor is like a house inspector, who tells you what needs to be fixed to make it more marketable. The author is the homeowner who is tasked to take the inspector's remarks and fix the damned house.

If an author is too lazy or self-absorbed to take an editor's suggestions to heart and change things, then yes, it is their fault. Not their editor's.

jfreedan said:

Now wait a second, maybe the author's manuscript was correct and the editor changed it? You have no idea what the manuscript looked like before it got to the editor.

I also think it's presumptuous to assume it's solely the writers fault, especially when it is the editor's job is to catch all the mistakes and correct them. Maybe the writer did make a mistake but so did the editor. They don't get a "it's the authors fault" cop out when they are paid to make sure those mistakes aren't there.

One thing I do know is that sometimes people believe a word is spelled wrong when it is not. On more than one occasion someone has pointed out a word to me that they think is misspelled and it is actually the variant (British or American) spelling of the word.

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It doesn't work that way. The editor edits, then teh writers gets to go trhough the edited manuscript. When everything is done and the galley proofs are put together, teh writer then gets to go over those.

The writer always gets the last look at a manuscript, always gets to do the final proofread, so if the editor changes something the writer had correct, the writer always has the oportunity to change it back again. So no matter how the mansucript looked before the editor got his hands on it, the writer still has a chance to correct everything in the book.

Nor is it the editor's job to catch all mistakes and correct them. He does what he can, which is usually a lot, but catching and correcting mistakes is primarily the writer's job.

"It's the writer's fault" is not a cop out. It's the writer's book, the writer's name goes on the cover, the writer is, after all, the writer, and the writer always gets the last chance to look at the manuscript and correct any mistakes.

It is the editor's job to help make the book better, and he usually does, but he's not the writer, and he's probably working on fifty-eleven other manuscripts at the same time he's dealing with yours, which means he has every right to expect you to find and correct any errors he misses in your manuscript.

If you want a perfect book to emerge from the press, you must take that last proofread as your chance to make certain your manuscript has no errors.

ChaosTitan said:

There seems to be a very consistent misunderstanding here about what an editor does. They don't go in, fix your manuscript for you, then send it back and say "here, all better." No. They mark it up and make corrections, and then send those corrections back to the author to IMPLEMENT.

To make it even simpler: The editor is like a house inspector, who tells you what needs to be fixed to make it more marketable. The author is the homeowner who is tasked to take the inspector's remarks and fix the damned house.

If an author is too lazy or self-absorbed to take an editor's suggestions to heart and change things, then yes, it is their fault. Not their editor's.

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I think you're onto something here. I don't know if anyone in AW falls into this category, but some people don't know that editors make marks on the manuscript showing the changes that they recommend. They don't indicate errors by actually fixing them in the document. It's my understanding that even with a file instead of hard copy, the editor doesn't type over the parts that are wrong to make them right. They have a system of showing the author the mistakes, not changing them.

Still, the editor is responsible for a job well done. She is responsible for her own mistakes (especially if her suggestions are wrong). But she's not responsible for the author's decisions about which changes to implement. As for the silly mistakes that several people miss, she bears part of the responsibility, because she, too, missed them.

jfreedan said:

I also think it's presumptuous to assume it's solely the writers fault, especially when it is the editor's job is to catch all the mistakes and correct them. Maybe the writer did make a mistake but so did the editor. They don't get a "it's the authors fault" cop out when they are paid to make sure those mistakes aren't there.

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With very rare exceptions—like, the wrong postcript file got sent to the printer, it by golly is the writer's responsibility.

The editor suggests; the writer implements.

There's a reason that the writer's name is on the cover.

In one of Zoey Dean's novels, she remarks that a character had a haircut "like Wilma from Scooby Doo." It's Velma, not Wilma. Wilma is a Flintstones character.

In another Zoey Dean book, someone is reading Willa Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. This is a huge error. The book that became a famous movie is called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Just because a movie came from a book doesn't mean the book has the same title as the movie. Gosh.

Books seem to be held to a higher standard than any other fiction medium. The crap which regularly gets passed off as 'scientific' on television and film would be laughed out of the door in a novel, yet some people (a minority, but still a large enough percentage of the population of this planet to give me doubts as to intelligent life on Earth) actually believe some of the technological innovations in popular fiction have actually come about in real life.

And there might have been a tie-in edition of Willy Wonka with the film's name plastered on the cover...

ChaosTitan said:

There seems to be a very consistent misunderstanding here about what an editor does. They don't go in, fix your manuscript for you, then send it back and say "here, all better." No. They mark it up and make corrections, and then send those corrections back to the author to IMPLEMENT.

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Excellent. Thank you.

No one person is solely responsible for errors that appear in print. Publishing a book is a collaboration among many parties. The editor has an important role in that collaboration, but is by no means The Great Power.

ChaosTitan said:

There seems to be a very consistent misunderstanding here about what an editor does. They don't go in, fix your manuscript for you, then send it back and say "here, all better." No. They mark it up and make corrections, and then send those corrections back to the author to IMPLEMENT.

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You know, when you write ....

They mark it up and make corrections

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....to "prove" that editors don't make corrections to a manuscript, you're arguing against yourself.

It does not matter who has to actually change the manuscript.

The editor's job is to edit. By the very definition of the word, their job is to find errors. Their responsibility isn't shifted just because they told someone else to fix the errors they found.

When errors still make it into the manuscript that means they made a mistake. It's really that simple.

Now, I didn't say it was solely the editors fault. I said it was not solely the authors fault and that editors share part of the blame.

Besides, with the small fortune it takes to publish, market and distribute a book, I rather doubt editors are letting authors have the final decision on whether a book rife with errors goes into the market.

This is more of a printing error, but last night my mom was reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and she discovered that pages 400-476 were replaced with pages from the 100s. I wanted her to keep it because it was kind of cool, but she exchanged it for a better copy

bclement412 said:

This is more of a printing error, but last night my mom was reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and she discovered that pages 400-476 were replaced with pages from the 100s. I wanted her to keep it because it was kind of cool, but she exchanged it for a better copy

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That's a signature error, and they do happen.

jfreedan said:

You know, when you write ....
The editor's job is to edit. By the very definition of the word, their job is to find errors. Their responsibility isn't shifted just because they told someone else to fix the errors they found.

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This is absolutely not an editors job--and you've just managed to piss off a lot of editors all at once.

It's not even a proofer's job to "catch errors."

The proofer sees it "in proof," AFTER the author.

And YES, authors have the last word. The final option is to return the ms. and tell the author to keep the advance.

There's a reason STET exists--and that with a BNA you will sometimes find the author STETs everything--and so the book goes out like that.

Medievalist said:

This is absolutely not an editor's job--and you've just managed to piss off a lot of editors all at once.

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Yes.

Let's step out of the bubble of one editor and one book and into the reality of one editor and a deluge of books - of varying quality - on tight and competing deadlines. Maybe in the fairy tale of Once upon a time, someone sat around and confirmed every single fact in a manuscript and the diligent author thoroughly reviewed every single markup and maybe even found other errors to fix. That is not the real world.

Editors don't tell authors to fix corrections. Editors make change or correction suggestions. They do not hold all the power you seem to think they do, jfreedan.

What kills me are all out typos, spacing errors, etc. I know if I catch them on the first read, they should SCREAM to the copy editor.

Plot errors, I can forgive.