Posted by bryanrasmussen 3 days ago
These days lots of books are self published. And even the big publishers spend less money + time on this kind of thing.
Then in the second and third pass the author is obviously more concerned about fixing continuity, story and flow than about hunting typos.
Perhaps the most important clue is in the first paragraph: “one thing I can always rely on is being let down by a popular or acclaimed piece of contemporary art.”
It’s hard to be a contrarian unless you’re willing to go to some lengths to find something to be outraged about.
I disagree. The article is very clear about the distinction, especially during the segue into the more substantive issues with the writing. And it does put due blame for the typos on the editors, not just the author.
First off, it opens with the assertion that the Typo Generation is “an emerging, unconscious literary movement and ethos that should concern us all.” Literary movement implies that the writer is the core problem.
Second, he switches from typo complaints to critique of the writing itself with this line:
“But even if that counterpoint has failed to persuade you, concerningly there are other glaring flaws I’d like to submit to the court.”
That’s it. That’s the segue. There is no clear distinction between editor and author until much later, when he finally gets around to saying “But it is time to move on from the author and text itself.” This is literally 5,000 words into the essay. I don’t think you can call that part of the opening chunk.
And then he reinforces his ill-advised rejection of editorial responsibility immediately with “Although I would argue that any truly serious and ethical writer — one who continually steps back from and revisits a text to trace its anatomy out of aesthetic passion or political or social necessity (because why else would someone be a writer?) — largely (not completely) invalidates the role of an editor.”
This is stupid. Very few writers are so good they don’t need an editor. It’s also objectively clumsy writing; I’m exactly the kind of tortured writer who would put two parenthetical asides inside a digression marked by em-dashes. So I recognize this particular flaw, and I sympathize with it. I just don’t make excuses for it.
And he can’t even allow his conclusion to stand. That second parenthetical, “not completely,” is simply hedging.
Personally I've noticed this as well - I think hot authors are given free rein to publish again on as short of a timeline as possible. Publishing is a tough business and when you have a marketable name, you have to move quickly or lose the attention of the reading public. So they rush out the new book, or reissue an old one, in order to keep sales up. The quality suffers - if The Trees (which I have not read) was given a solid, collaborative close edit, these issues would very likely be resolved. Instead you see what is consistent with a superficial edit of a book that perhaps was not really ready to be meet the public just yet.
Last, friendly typo note for yourself: I believe you meant whose, not who's!
And I agree on the timeline being rushed. If the author of the piece had reached conclusions about the state of publishing rather than coining cute terms like “Typo Generation,” I’d be much more sympathetic.
I can always rely on being bored by an article claiming to be superior to common or popular art.
I'm sure there are legitimate criticisms to level against whichever book he was complaining about, but he failed to make any.
Typos are bad. Typos have always existed. Are there more now? Seems unlikely, but someone could do some actual work to find out.
I hear that excuse constantly on the web if I try to correct people. And maybe it doesn't "prohibit access", but it does force me to think about things that aren't the point of the message, in order to figure out the point of the message.
I've given up correcting people. I'm old enough now that it's time to just watch people's choices come back on them. The whole world will pay for it, and I've done what I can.
I can't even get people to stop using "weary" to mean "wary". That's a whole different meaning, and there are so many people that use it wrong.
I have a working theory that the prevalence of typos has been increasing in recent years, and it's on purpose:
* Humans trying to distinguish themselves from bots might add intentional typos to convey this
* AI bots, armed with the above knowledge, will also use this trick to seem more human
Of course, many typos are genuine, but this is increasingly not the case imo.
I've also given up correcting people, unless they've specifically asked me for editing help on a write-up or something similar. I offered draft editing to people on my previous team - it was surprisingly popular.
Interesting, I don't recall seeing that one before. Do you think people are mentally just adding a 'y' to the word 'wear' (and still pronouncing it in their head like 'wary') -- or do you think they are thinking of it as the real word 'weary' (having the long 'e' sound like the word 'weep')?
"Force you to think" as long as the meaning isnt changed, isnt a bad thing
In these cases, you're not thinking about the material; you're thinking about carelessly it's been put together, and how little regard the author appears to have for the audience.
Now, could (or couldn't) "careless" bothers me.
(typos deliebrate to prove point)
Same first letters, the dots and the t roughly line up, apparently good enough for me
Language has always been a localization of mispronounced and misspelled words. Just think about every word for an item but is just very slightly different across languages. The more modern age (lets say somewhere between the printing press and now) is exceptional as different languages and dialects have absolutely collapsed. Local dialects became regional and mixed. In smaller countries regional dialects became national. In big countries like the US meme words spread quickly across the nation because of things like radio, TV, and now internet.
You were living an a massively privileged position in time and you didn't realize it.
That's just what it feels like not to be important.
In older books that persisted over long periods of time and popularity we've seen misspellings of the same word on the same page. These things got copied selectively over time and caused splits in language.
In the modern age quite often these misspellings can evolve into new words and/or memes. It's how language evolves.
At the end of the day it's very difficult to do anything about this at scale without reversing a bunch of technology. Simply put the average person isn't this careful in day to day writing. Yet we ask the average person to create more writing per person than any other time in history. By anecdotal observation I believe that most of these people don't want to shit out zillions of lines of text at all and only feel forced to do this by modern demands. Hence, this is why LLMs quickly took over shitting out zillions of lines of text. The people that were doing it by keyboard before were glad to give it up. The number of people that want to be precise about it is simply very low the same as the rest of history.
The question is what can you do about it without becoming an insane authoritarian in the process and probably making things worse?
Progression or regression is not a "you" or an "I" thing, it's a "we" thing. Constant progression isn't much different from constant acceleration, you can't keep producing more energy forever, you eventually hit limits. In societies these limits much more quickly than the limits of the universe. Even maintaining status quo requires energy, so who are you going to get to spend that energy? And at the same time as all of this you still have all the base desires of the human animal. Greed and lust and selfishness isn't going away. The newer generations that didn't experience the terrible times isn't born with the defenses against terrible times like the old generations do, and over time the systems that are needed to protect against bad things fall apart because not enough people understand the costs behind them.
This cycle is as old as humanity itself. I don't think human intelligence is going to get us out of the trap unless we're talking world population scale manipulation or editing of humans.
"Entrée" refers to the starter in French, whereas in the US, it refers to the main dish.
"A date" in the sense of a romantic encounter, originates from the English use of "date" in the sense of a calendar date. The word was then borrowed back into French, this time with its English meaning (and is pronounced the same way as in English).
"Connoisseur" is spelled "connaisseur" in modern French, while English kept the old spelling.
"Con" used to be a vulgar term for the vagina in French. Today, it is mainly used as an insult to describe someone as stupid.
The best fully-human writers of the next generation will be those who are very conscientious at grammar class and master all the rules, because by breaking them, they'll be able to push their prose to the most remote and unlikely locales in the geodesics of LLM-next-token-prediction-probability space. Such places where the Machines deign not trudge.
This will always be appreciated regardless of any stylistic shibboleths indicating human authorship.
> but The Trees’ faults are untold, and they are untold in the second sense of the word.
Untold:
1. too much or too many to be counted
2. (of a story or an event) not narrated