Things that make you go …
… grrrr.
Been doing a lot of reading. As you do in this game. But not just YA books. Plenty of recent adult award winners, books for younger readers, newspapers and magazines. Not to mention the online stuff. And something is really beginning to bring out the inner pedant.
Books for the ‘adult reader’, newspapers, magazines and books for younger readers have the occasional typo or editing issue. They are there, but not often. Picture books, hardly ever. But YA? It seems to be the norm rather than the exception lately that there is at least one (but often more) glaring error in each title. And it’s not just local. A couple of major international award winners have had mistakes leap out that are at best annoying, and at worst disrupt the flow of the narrative.
A few examples, just from memory, but they stick in the mind. No names, no pack drill:
- Homonyms: how hard is it to check whether the correct word is ’slither’ or ’sliver’ (twice in two pages) or ‘discretely’ / ‘discreetly’? Although the ’s’ words aren’t even homonyms if you listen hard.
- Spelling: if a word like ‘gazumped’ is in the text on several occasions, please spell it correctly.
- Checkable facts: Even Wikipedia will do to check the name of the protagonist of a landmark 20th century novel when it is used in an intertextual reference. Or the postcode book for the correct spelling of one of Sydney’s best-known suburbs, both wrong throughout.
- Grammar: ‘he went with x and I’.
- Proofing: the singular ‘woman’ used when the sentence clearly requires the plural. Or a novel that depends on font differentiation in the narrative forgetting to apply it, causing confusion.
Why is it so? I’m not blaming the authors – their job is to write an engaging narrative. But something is not right, and is it fair to our YA audience not to offer excellence in all aspects of their reading experience? Or doesn’t it matter?
Image used under Creative Commons licence.
July 24th, 2009 at 10:27 am
I totally agree with you that there are more and more mistakes going undetected in YA novels. In particular I find the words practice as a noun and practise as a verb used incorrectly all the time. Surely it would be advantageous for the publisher to employ a decent proofreader of their Proof pages before sending it to the printers.
Posted on behalf of Dajo Finlayson (QLD)
July 25th, 2009 at 9:47 am
My radar is on the alert for that one, too, Dajo, although the American spelling preference is for the c in both verb and noun forms.