Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Editing woes ... again

Scarcely a day passes as a Civil War book reader without being subjected to one or more of the usual suspects of careless print editing errors (e.g. secession/succession, disperse/disburse, calvary/cavalry, ordinance/ordnance, eminent/imminent and the like). That's one level, but it's almost comically inconceivable to have to read about Ewell's "corpse" chasing Yankees across the countryside or troops being subjected to a "fuselage" of rifle fire. In my mind, such word travesties lead to an especially jarring brand of narrative spell breaking. Many people are able to shrug this off as the natural consequence of the new economics of publishing but I find this kind of manuscript treatment disheartening.

6 comments:

  1. That sound you hear, echoing up from south Louisiana, is a reader of this blog laughing at a mental picture of Ewell's corpse stampeding after Yankees. Could this be from a forthcoming Ghosts of Gettysburg volume?

    Joel Manuel
    Baton Rouge

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    1. I debated whether or not I should name names but the sidebar offers good clues about which titles I've been reading recently. There was another really good one in the same book with Ewell's corps(e) but I forgot it.

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  2. Replies
    1. I see this sort of thing at work every day. You can tell people not to trust spell check, but if they can't spell to begin with, the battle is lost before it starts. BTW, I'm waging a one-person crusade against "most unique."

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  3. Seems only fair, since the Lost Causers have a thing about Stonewall's corpse taking Cemetery Hill on the evening of July 1.

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    Replies
    1. Ridding the army of Ewell was a common fantasy in '64 but they didn't have to kill him!

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