Subj : English skills
To   : Spectre
From : Arelor
Date : Tue Oct 18 2022 18:14:09

  Re: English skills
  By: Spectre to Arelor on Wed Oct 19 2022 07:43 am

 >  Ar> Actually, what did you expect?
 > 
 > To be frank, better.
 > 
 >  The errors I see are so basic anyone casting an eye over the text should
 > be able to pick it up.  I can get with the idea when you write something,
 > and edit it, you'll have a tendency to read what you thought you wrote,
 > that's why there are proofreaders or in fact non-proofreaders also.
 > 
 > If you can't get it right, and you have no form of reader proof or otherwise,
 > I find it will help quite significantly if you read it to yourself aloud.
 > You'll often find things that get overlooked otherwise.
 > 
 > Spec
 > 
 > 
 > *** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
 > --- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
 >  * Origin: Good Luck and drive offensively! (21:3/101)

I come from a tech documentation background, so when I think of bad mistakes, I think
of functional mistakes. If you assign a wrong number to a part or a diagram, you can
cause a lot of trouble for the user.

Then there are the instruction sets you cannot replicate for cheap in your home. Maybe
you are writing some tutorial for a specific piece of equipment you are very familiar
with, but you don't happen to have nearby by the time you are writing, and since
deadlines are a bitch you end up finishing the piece crouched in the backseat of a
bus.

That is the reason why you have a team for hunting mistakes.

I find it is a lot like that in the world of literary writings. Even under ideal
conditions, any text of a respectable size will have mistakes, no matter you have
gone through it three times, and then had a proofreading team go through it three
extra times. Keep in mind I have not started about examining plot consistency yet.

My gripe is the current industry of written fiction pretty much expects authors to
deliver a publishing grade work to the publishing house. This means a given author is
to deliver a text which is 95% ready for publication, in a formatting determined by
the publisher, in exchange for a 85% probability of the publisher sending the text to
/dev/null without ever reading it.

Think of it. The author is supposed to accomplish a titanic task in exchange for a
meager probability of it being read. Basically, we are asking writers to do work for
value of 250*bucks in exchange of scraps. OF COURSE quality is going to suffer. If you
think a manuscript has a hitting chance of only 2%, its marginal value is close to
worthless, so if you can spend a day instead of one week on it, you will.

*  Aproximate labor time taken to write a short story, if time is priced at minimum
wage rates.



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