Atrocious proofreading/copywriting from large organisations

[Bayum]

Rose-tinted glasses, I fear. These mistakes were very common in the sixties when I was at school, otherwise we wouldn’t have always been told not to make them. Indeed, I would say that using apostrophes to make a plural has declined a lot in the thirty-odd years I’ve been marking books.

Eurgh. Wish my class didn’t use apostrophes at all. Anything that has an ‘s’ at the end of the word seems fair game. Does something belong to that person? Is it a contraction? Does it need an apostrophe? No!

 

[Inversnecky]

I would say that using apostrophes to make a plural has declined a lot in the thirty-odd years I’ve been marking books.

Speaking of books, it’s interesting to see error appearing that would never have got through a few decades ago.

 

[Paul Jones 88]

TFC Supermarket in Edmonton has a sign saying
25% off fruit and veg every Sundays,
Always makes me smile.
Doily Male anyone?

 

[jfollows]

I concur, having spent 30 years as a journalist, half that time as editor of a weekly newspaper series and later sub-editing regional dailies.

The Manchester Evening News, to name but one paper, is desperately in need of your services. I can only believe that they have eliminated all sub-editors given the appalling low standard of the rubbish they print, and often obvious (to me) errors get into print.

 

[Inversnecky]

It is amazing, though, how you can reread on the screen umpteen times a document you’ve written and not spot a thing, yet when you print it out, you easily notice a dozen errors.

 

[341o2]

The Manchester Evening News, to name but one paper, is desperately in need of your services. I can only believe that they have eliminated all sub-editors given the appalling low standard of the rubbish they print, and often obvious (to me) errors get into print.

One of the reasons I read the Bournemouth Echo for its typos and incorrect information such as the wrong photo from Streetview following a collision (which is always dramatically described as as a crash as in "Pedestrian involved in crash with car")

A recent article on bygone railways in Christchurch pictured a steam excursion from New Zealand

 

[Mcr Warrior]

Didn't "The Guardian" newspaper infamously get re-monikered some years ago as "The Grauniad" on account of its numerous typographical errors? Think 'Private Eye' may have been behind the name change.

 

[Jimini]

Didn't "The Guardian" newspaper infamously get re-monikered some years ago as "The Grauniad" on account of its numerous typographical errors? Think 'Private Eye' may have been behind the name change.

Yep -- that one still gets bandied around in the industry on a regular basis!

 

[Gloster]

Quite a few contributors on this forum still refer to it as the Grauniad. On one occasion, I can’t remember the reason why that particular day was chosen, they changed the masthead to The Grauniad.

Not a newspaper mistake, but the worst error I have seen, was in Sweden about thirty years ago. On the six o’clock news it was reported that a policeman had been shot dead in Stockholm: they gave the correct name but put another policeman’s picture on screen. (That might have been the police’s fault.)

 

[py_megapixel]

Just read this abomination of a sentence:
"Due to high demand and inclement weather, expect some shipping delays at this time, orders may not ship for 4-5 business days."

Where does the punctuation go, and what does the 'at this time' actually refer to?
Is it supposed to be:
"Due to high demand and inclement weather, expect some shipping delays. At this time, orders may not ship for 4-5 business days."
or:
"Due to high demand and inclement weather, expect some shipping delays at this time. Orders may not ship for 4-5 business days."
or:
"Due to high demand and inclement weather at this time, expect some shipping delays. Orders may not ship for 4-5 business days"

These all convey the same sentiment but are grammatically different. I would like them to pick one!

 

[APT618S]

Proof reading is difficult due to the way the brain is wired.
After all you can read this text correctly at virtually normal speed:


"For emaxlpe, it deson’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod aepapr, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pcale. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit pobelrm."

Source:

Breaking the Code: Why Yuor Barin Can Raed Tihs

People can easily read passages in which the letters are in the wrong order in words, as well as passages in which many letters are replaced with numbers. Neuroscientists explain why.

www.livescience.com

 

[341o2]

An example where punctuation can completely alter the meaning of a sentence.

From a magazine cover

Rachael Ray
finds inspiration
in cooking
her family
and her dog

 

[Devonian]

I once had to ask an advertiser to clarify whether they really "cater to mixed sex parties" or if they actually catered to "mixed-sex parties".

My local paper managed to print an entire article describing a new restaurant as "The Bosun's Brassiere", forcing them to run a follow-up article of apology featuring a photo of the owner displaying one of her brassieres in her brasserie "so that readers may be sure of the difference".

Didn't "The Guardian" newspaper infamously get re-monikered some years ago as "The Grauniad" on account of its numerous typographical errors? Think 'Private Eye' may have been behind the name change.

Private Eye's version has become so well-known that The Guardian have registered www.grauniad.co.uk.

Having typset and proofread countless long and complex documents, I have some sympathy when mistakes are made. My team identified two phenomena that tripped us up: 'Ctrl-Z errors', which was when it was all too easy to hit Ctrl-Z to undo something but hit the keys one too many times, causing something to be 'undone' several pages back in a document without any visual cue; and 'spell check fatigue', where things like web and e-mail addresses, serial numbers, foreign names or symbol fonts caused the spell check to throw up hundreds of 'errors' in long documents that were not really errors at all - and which would reappear every time you ran the spellcheck - inviting you to hit 'skip... skip... skip... skip...' and get so used to skipping that you ended up approving genuine errors.

We knew that it was impossible to proofread our own work, so we had documents printed out and proofread by several people, including academically trained and professional proofreaders: yet errors crept through. Often it was because people simply read what they expected to see, or focussed on blocks of text but not the headlines, or forgot the captions, or got carried away with the content rather than the SPAG. It was a constant worry that we would miss something obvious, and I blush at some of the errors that got through.

 

[Gloster]

One of the best I had was when my laptop altered cranage, the provision of a crane and correct for the sentence I was using it in, to carnage.

 

[jfollows]

One of the best I had was when my laptop altered cranage, the provision of a crane and correct for the sentence I was using it in, to carnage.

Yes, it seems like I have an endless fight with computer software which defaults to auto-correct. Even finding out how to disable the feature is hard sometimes. This forum is good because it underlines but doesn't change "cranage" in my quotation of your post above, that's fine with me, warn me by all means but just don't change it ...........

 

[Bayum]

Proof reading is difficult due to the way the brain is wired.
After all you can read this text correctly at virtually normal speed:


"For emaxlpe, it deson’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod aepapr, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pcale. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit pobelrm."

Source:

Breaking the Code: Why Yuor Barin Can Raed Tihs

People can easily read passages in which the letters are in the wrong order in words, as well as passages in which many letters are replaced with numbers. Neuroscientists explain why.

www.livescience.com

If you can read. Not particularly helpful for my 7, 8, 9 year olds in class!

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 3 Feb 2022 ==

Proof reading is difficult due to the way the brain is wired.
After all you can read this text correctly at virtually normal speed:


"For emaxlpe, it deson’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod aepapr, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pcale. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit pobelrm."

Source:

Breaking the Code: Why Yuor Barin Can Raed Tihs

People can easily read passages in which the letters are in the wrong order in words, as well as passages in which many letters are replaced with numbers. Neuroscientists explain why.

www.livescience.com

The missing comma after ‘after all’ is purposeful, yes?

 

[Strat-tastic]

An example where punctuation can completely alter the meaning of a sentence.

From a magazine cover

Rachael Ray
finds inspiration
in cooking
her family
and her dog

Yes, it needs a comma after family
Dogs are way more important.

 

[Bayum]

An example where punctuation can completely alter the meaning of a sentence.

From a magazine cover

Rachael Ray
finds inspiration
in cooking
her family
and her dog

Man eating shark?
Or man-eating shark?

 

[Gloster]

There has been some coverage of a real howler: souvenir crockery for the Queen’s Jubilee spelling it Jubbly. This has rather overshadowed her picture on the items which looks nothing like her. (And that is without making jokes about the picture showing a smiling face.) I have been wondering quite who the picture does ressemble.

 

[341o2]

Typos are nothing new, in 1631 there was a print run of the Bible omitting the "not" in the seventh commandment. This became known as the wicked bible. Every copy was recalled and the printers fined

One newspaper apparently reported that Queen Victoria pissed over Westminster bridge

There have been a couple of instances where contractors have applied road markings "SHCOOL"

And small ads such as - Lost. Umbrella by gentleman with three broken ribs
For sale. Willard saw by man with newly sharpened teeth

 

[pdeaves]

There have been a couple of instances where contractors have applied road markings "SHCOOL"

Things like that highlight the old adage that the bigger the print, the bigger the mistake.

 

[Tester]

I walked around the perimeter of the Birmingham Curzon Street station site yesterday and saw a printed sign, complete with HS2 logo, referring to VEHICALS.

I remembered this thread later and wished I had taken a photo of it!

 

[scarby]

I think from the OP's original point, there are two different issues here, although they are in some ways related.

One, which has been covered a lot here, is a lack of editing or proofreading.

The second is that many organisations don't employ professional writers, resulting in poorly-produced copy. Unfortunately this can result in copy that is not interesting to read, it can be over-long or wooden, and the important or even basic information for the reader (such as the what, when, where and how) is missing or unclear, meaning they have to then go elsewhere to seek out what they need to know.

 

[jfollows]

A role that I undertake from time to time is simply to read, review and comment on documents written by others. It's primarily voluntary work for organisations such as the Stroke Association. I'm less interested in simple spelling mistakes but more on what the document is trying to say versus what I think it's saying. I tend to send my comments under the cover of "my personal opinion based on reading this for the first time, I hope some of this is helpful, but feel free to ignore what you disagree with". The general feeling is that this makes for something better at the end of the process.

I can't, however, abide grammatical mistakes in formal documents - their/there, its/it's, all that kind of stuff. If I see these I tend to stop reading - if the author can't get this sort of thing right, then why should I trust the rest of the stuff they're writing.

So the Manchester Evening News can't get this right frequently, primarily because of a lack of attention to sub-editing I think. Equally, the same error in a forum post here doesn't bother me one bit, I don't expect the same standard. I don't see the same sort of error in The Times or The Guardian which are the papers I tend to read - the latter had spelling mistakes famously of course but not really grammatical errors.

I used to recruit people and read job applications. Again, I cast huge negative feelings at people who couldn't get their CVs correct in this way. Maybe they were good scientists, so maybe I was being unfair on them, but I felt that if they couldn't demonstrate rigour in something as important as this, that probably reflected on their other work.

We're none of us perfect, me especially, so in the end a gentle tolerance of perceived mistakes is generally wise. But we're also human and certain things just jar.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 4 Feb 2022 ==

Also, albeit not from a "large organisation", I was recently posting an extract from a railway book into this forum. The starting signs were not good given that the title on the spine reads "Mancester to Crewe". I scanned the part of the book I wanted to post, then ran it through some OCR software (Tesseract), then put the resulting text into Word which highlighted things it didn't like, and I read what I had "created". What was surprising to me was the large number of spelling and grammatical errors and inconsistencies which, it turned out, were in the book and not an artefact of the scanning/OCR process. It's a good book, but it's bad to see the errors. I agree that it's hard to see your own errors in a document, but the author should have engaged someone otherwise not connected with the book to read it through before committing it to print.

I also once worked for part of IBM that wrote books. I had people for a number of weeks - six usually - working on a new product and they wrote about it. I told them that I'd take what they'd done and make it readable in my opinion. This took a fair bit of my time. I then passed the result on to the editing team. In my case they told me that most of their effort was in turning "English" into "American" and, in turn, I told them that I wouldn't complain about this. They also told me that - in their opinion as editors - it was clear that one or two of my colleagues had never understood the content of the book and made their job - as non-technical people - very much harder. It was an interesting job and I enjoyed it, but I very much valued the work the editing team did.

 

[S&CLER]

A role that I undertake from time to time is simply to read, review and comment on documents written by others. It's primarily voluntary work for organisations such as the Stroke Association. I'm less interested in simple spelling mistakes but more on what the document is trying to say versus what I think it's saying. I tend to send my comments under the cover of "my personal opinion based on reading this for the first time, I hope some of this is helpful, but feel free to ignore what you disagree with". The general feeling is that this makes for something better at the end of the process.

I can't, however, abide grammatical mistakes in formal documents - their/there, its/it's, all that kind of stuff. If I see these I tend to stop reading - if the author can't get this sort of thing right, then why should I trust the rest of the stuff they're writing.

So the Manchester Evening News can't get this right frequently, primarily because of a lack of attention to sub-editing I think. Equally, the same error in a forum post here doesn't bother me one bit, I don't expect the same standard. I don't see the same sort of error in The Times or The Guardian which are the papers I tend to read - the latter had spelling mistakes famously of course but not really grammatical errors.

I used to recruit people and read job applications. Again, I cast huge negative feelings at people who couldn't get their CVs correct in this way. Maybe they were good scientists, so maybe I was being unfair on them, but I felt that if they couldn't demonstrate rigour in something as important as this, that probably reflected on their other work.

We're none of us perfect, me especially, so in the end a gentle tolerance of perceived mistakes is generally wise. But we're also human and certain things just jar.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 4 Feb 2022 ==

Also, albeit not from a "large organisation", I was recently posting an extract from a railway book into this forum. The starting signs were not good given that the title on the spine reads "Mancester to Crewe". I scanned the part of the book I wanted to post, then ran it through some OCR software (Tesseract), then put the resulting text into Word which highlighted things it didn't like, and I read what I had "created". What was surprising to me was the large number of spelling and grammatical errors and inconsistencies which, it turned out, were in the book and not an artefact of the scanning/OCR process. It's a good book, but it's bad to see the errors. I agree that it's hard to see your own errors in a document, but the author should have engaged someone otherwise not connected with the book to read it through before committing it to print.

I also once worked for part of IBM that wrote books. I had people for a number of weeks - six usually - working on a new product and they wrote about it. I told them that I'd take what they'd done and make it readable in my opinion. This took a fair bit of my time. I then passed the result on to the editing team. In my case they told me that most of their effort was in turning "English" into "American" and, in turn, I told them that I wouldn't complain about this. They also told me that - in their opinion as editors - it was clear that one or two of my colleagues had never understood the content of the book and made their job - as non-technical people - very much harder. It was an interesting job and I enjoyed it, but I very much valued the work the editing team did.

Copy editing is an underappreciated skill and one which some publishers, especially academic houses, have seriously neglected in an attempt to save money. The late unlamented era of "camera-ready copy" was the worst in my experience, which is of about 16 academic book translations. (I've lost count without the copies by me, as they are almost all presented to my old college library, which likes to receive its old members' publications.) Submitting MSS on disk is an improvement on that. I was incensed to find, when I received the presentation copies of a book I had translated a couple of years ago, that although it had been edited by two excellent scholars and the most experienced reader in Toronto U.P., a mistake had still crept in which was not in my original submission (the name Pausanias became Pausanius).

One particularly frequent error in newspapers nowadays is failure to make verbs agree in number with the subject. I'm thinking of such howlers as "work on the platforms have started".

 

[SargeNpton]

I think from the OP's original point, there are two different issues here, although they are in some ways related.

One, which has been covered a lot here, is a lack of editing or proofreading.

The second is that many organisations don't employ professional writers, resulting in poorly-produced copy. Unfortunately this can result in copy that is not interesting to read, it can be over-long or wooden, and the important or even basic information for the reader (such as the what, when, where and how) is missing or unclear, meaning they have to then go elsewhere to seek out what they need to know.

You missed the third point: the general declining standard in English Language proficiency amongst school leavers. If they don't understand the correct use of spelling, grammar and punctuation how do you expect them to produce decent copy when they start work?

 

[S&CLER]

If it's any consolation to anglophones, the standard of written French doesn't seem to be much better either. I read Le Figaro on line most days and notice in the readers' comments that many native speakers make blatant errors, spelling words as they sound and not as they ought to be written. And in the last 10 minutes, translating a conveyance for a property in Amsterdam, I have spotted an omission of the word "not" that destroys the meaning of the clause; this in a document drafted by an expensive law firm.

 

[contrex]

One newspaper apparently reported that Queen Victoria pissed over Westminster bridge

I wouldn't put it past a mischievous or republican minded compositor to alter the mention of Queen Victoria. There was a case of one altering a report in the Times of 23 January 1882, of a speech by the Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, to include 'The speaker then said he felt inclined for a bit of f*****g.' (My apostrophes). This was missed by proof-readers and made its way into the first edition. The Times hastily tried to recall all copies, but news had got round and copies, cover price 3 old pence, were changing hands for 12 shillings & 6d (150 old pence).

 

[341o2]

There is also a Beecham story which might be an urban legend where he was looking for singers and sent one of his talent scouts to listen to one Maria Fuchs.
Beecham received a telegram "Maria Fuchs wonderful" with a typo
"I dare say she does, " replied Beecham, "Now stop enjoying yourself and find out whether she can sing."

 

[ABB125]

Someone at Gloucestershire Live doesn't understand the difference between "who's" and "whose". It should be latter, but they've put the former instead.