Back when I was looking for the sort of career I could combine with childcare (this was before I had children, which is hands-down the best time to have theories about combining careers with childcare) I did a copy-editing course and applied to several publishers. One of them wrote back to say that they already had a full complement of excellent copy-editing staff and doubted the ability of a computer nerd to find any errors in one of their books. As it happened, they were the publishers of “The Witches’ Hammer” so I wrote back to them pointing out the scene in which the heroine is in bed with one of the red shirts strong male characters, where they are sharing a glass of red wine and smoking. The heroine crushes out her cigarette in the wineglass EEW EEW EEW EEW!!!!. Two paragraphs later she raises the wine glass to her mouth and takes a deep drink. Now personally I really hope she got a bad dose of nicotine poisoning and spent the afternoon talking to God on the great white china telephone, and the author merely covered for her by saying she travelled back home with a new awareness of the vulnerability of trusting humans; but on a less personal level there’s a copy editor there who needs to have their knuckles rapped and a motivational SPELL CHECKS ARE NO SUBSTITUTE FOR COMMON SENSE sign nailed to their forehead.
I still didn’t get the job.
I’m probably getting old and crabby – oh, scratch the probably. But I am intensely irritated by sloppiness in writing. I’m reading True Evil now, and the engaging story is starting to suffer severe interruption from the careless errors. Our heroine recalls her father, a police detective, whose two unforgettable characteristics are his impeccable police work and his habit of saying exactly what he thinks to whoever is listening. A page later she compares him to the hero doctor, because apparently they are both quiet men. And a few pages later she recalls the amount of time he spent with his only grandson; more than he had spent with herself and her sister, because back then when they were young he was building a business. Honey, these three men you call Daddy may well be admirable characters, but only one of them is biological. And all this was before a species of cobra was described as one of the ‘shiest’ of his genus. Maybe use the spell check and the common sense?
And that applies to the papers in double measure. Although maybe common sense is unto paparazzi as Pluto is to an ant. Take this lovely statement from the Daily Mail regarding Emma Watson modelling some improbably expensive stuff:
“The 21-year-old is dripping in the latest designer creations from the likes of Yves Saint Laurent to Emilio Pucci in the new issue of Harper's Bazaar UK.”
Well, is she dripping, or is she wearing?
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| Wearing. Dripping. Which is it? |
And then there’s this faithfully reported gem from none other than that modest humanitarian, Paris Hilton : 'All girls worry about their weight and I’m no different, except for the fact that when I gain a pound the whole world thinks I’m fat.'
Cheer up. I can assure you that the families of 11000 dead and missing Japanese tsunami victims, 147 Christchurch earthquake victims and 35 victims of the Afghanistan suicide bomb attack are not glued to their televisions and radios waiting with bated breath for the Paris Hilton Weight Gain Report.
Perhaps common sense is not as common as one would assume
