The Wrong Word Entirely, # 62

Pain is not inflicted solely by zombies in what turns out to be the second edition of this novel:

Source: Kristen Middleton, Zombie Games (Origins), 2nd edn e-book (self-published, 2012), p. 126

there for they’re

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 43

Some readers will recall that this novel have featured before — more than once. This is, I think, the last from my archive, and a wonderful mangle it is too!

Diane Capri, Due Justice (Boise, ID: Stonegate, 2012. Previously published as Carly’s Conspiracy), p. 218. Link: Amazon.co.uk

I’m not sure what the writer thinks eek means. Certainly she’s not evoking an Middle English word for ‘also’, or having her character make an interjection of surprise. Yet eke, which OED confirms means ‘to lengthen’ or ‘to prolong’ or ‘to supplement’, doesn’t seem to fit the context either. 

Merriam Webster, dismissing the meaning related to increasing or lengthening as archaic, offers a single example of modern usage, defining eke as ‘to get with great difficulty — usually used with out <eke out a living>’; and Oxford Dctionaries concurs: ‘eke (eke something out): Make an amount or supply of something last longer by using or consuming it frugally’.

However, this doesn’t seem to be something one can do with a name…

eek out the name

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 36

Not the only example around of this glorious howler:

Source: Isa-Lee Wolf, Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011), p. 138. Link: Amazon.co.uk

corporal for corporeal

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 115

The omission of the direct article here makes quite a difference to the meaning:

Source: Robin Allen, Out of the Frying Pan (Woodbury, MN: MIdnight Ink, 2013), p. 160. Link: Amazon

omitted the

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 32

I’m not going to flog this one, although there are many more variants out there. However, following on from yesterday’s mangle, it was hard to resist featuring a couple more accidentally well-educated body parts:

Source: Virginia Andrews, Scattered Leaves (London: Simon & Schuster, 2007), p. 46. Link: Google Books (eBook)

Link: Fitness Magazine [South Africa], Ben Greenfield, ‘Tips to tight and taught skin […]’

taught skin, taught lips

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 31

I came upon a version of this mangle on a website and wondered if it appeared in any books. Oh, yes:

Chris Coulter, The Deal (self-published through Xlibris, 2012), p. 60. Link: Google Books

That was but one of the results returned on a Google search that also offered the correct spelling:

Link: Google search, “taught buttocks”

If you click the Coulter link above you’ll get more (and more sexually explicit) context for the mangle, and it’s worth running the Google search just to see the term in various other (often sexually explicit) hilarious contexts. (Have I made the sexual explicitness warning clear enough?)

taught buttocks

Not Washed or Cooked, # 93

A sentence (and possibly a whole novel) untroubled by spellchecking or proofreading:

Barbara Cathey, Death of a Saleswoman, self-published (Authorhouse), 2004, p. 40. Link: GoogleBooks

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 96

Today, we return to Due Justice, a novel which has featured twice this year (on 19 September and 22 September) and whose Author’s Note, you may remember, suggests that the text has undergone a rigorous editing and proofing exercise. The first extract offers two mangles (or three, if you feel that the final sentence should be preceded by a comma, rather than a full stop; or several if you think the overall syntax is problematic):

Diane Capri, Due Justice (Boise, ID: Stonegate, 2012. Previously published as Carly’s Conspiracy), p. 210.
Link: Amazon.co.uk, LookInside

The second contains only one mangle, but it is a good one:

Diane Capri, Due Justice, p. 228

Double-take, # 29

The propensity for writers to begin sentences with qualifiers and subclauses, coupled with a lack of  lexical precision, sometimes leads to some odd propositions:

A. J. Braun, The Man With No Name, vol. 1: The Baby Hunters (A. J. Braun, 2013), chapter 1, paragraph 8.
Link: Amazon.co.uk, LookInside

The kitten referred to was Cat, not, as the construction ‘As a kitten, I […]’ suggests, the speaker. The speaker is a man, the Man With No Name of the title. He was never a kitten.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 95

Yesterday, ‘a “small ladies handbag”’. Today:

Source: Gemma Halliday, Viva Las Vegas (eBook edn © 2010, published in What Happens in Vegas). Link: Amazon.co.uk

Not Washed or Cooked, # 60

This book was featured last Thursday, with a suggestion that it might reappear… Here are two more ouch-inducing moments:

 Diane Capri, Due Justice (Boise, ID: Stonegate, 2012. Previously published as Carly’s Conspiracy), p. 95. Link: Amazon.co.uk

 Diane Capri, Due Justice p. 119.

The Author’s Note contains a surprising statement:

 Diane Capri, Due Justice p. 312.

It’s not entirely obvious what heavily might mean in the context, but apparently it isn’t intended to equate to effectively, accurately or soundly. The born should not have made it through proofreading, and the tewnty suggests that the text hasn’t been through a spell-checker ― a process that a reader might fairly expect will occur before publication…

Mangling Meaning, # 22

This won’t, I’m afraid, be the last time we see this text. It’s one of the few occasions I’ve wished I could draw so as to be able to illustrate a mangle:

Diane Capri, Due Justice (Boise, ID: Stonegate, 2012. Previously published as Carly’s Conspiracy). Link: Amazon.co.uk

What is a suitable prize to give a fish?

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 73

Given the generally sad reviews of the film World War Z, someone recommended that I read the original book, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks.

Here’s a mangle from it:

London: Gerald Duckworth & Co, 2006, p. 209. Link: Google Books, ‘started to wretch’

The word wretch, as used in British and North American English, is a noun with various meanings, of which probably the best known relate to a miserable or unfortunate person, or a reprehensible one. OED also lists an obsolete verb, meaning 1) ‘To render miserable’ or 2) ‘To be or become niggardly or parsimonious’.

The correct spelling for the context is retch.

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 13

A homophone has not been proofread out in the first sentence here. It’s unfortunate that the following paragraph mocks someone’s inaccurate spelling…

Link: Google Books, Linda S. Clayton, Just Buried

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 56

Twice it's wrong, and then suddenly it's right ― so why not correct the earlier ones?

Link: Google Books. Barbara Brink, Entangled

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 48

This book featured on 26 March, and I wondered whether more mangles would occur. This is unusual:

Link: Amazon.co.uk, L. J. Charles, A Touch of Ice (p. 202)

OED observes that glassier was one of several spelling variants for glazier in Middle English, although the sole example listed shows it used as an alternative to glazer, meaning a polishing tool or wheel, in 1688. I checked glassier in Merriam-Webster in case it was a usage specific to the USA, but it occurs only as a comparative form under the entry glassy.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 42

Today's mangle is taken from a book which is rather dogged by typographical errors:

 Link: Amazon.co.uk, L. J. Charles, A Touch of Ice (p. 12)

Refection, of course, is connected with refreshment and nourishment, so this unfortunate error might (depending on the reader) evoke anything from an image of nail-nibbling to a much less innocent suggestion of autoeroticism performed by someone extremely flexible…Either way, it should have been proofread out of the text before publication.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 38

Although I was a dab hand at calligraphy in the days before computers, I learnt early that I wasn't going to be someone who could draw. Most of the time I don't think about it; but I do wish I could do an illustration for today's mangle:

 Link: Robin Allen, If You Can't Stand the Heat (on Google Books)

The same error appears a couple more times in the book, but someone appears to have pointed it out to the author who, in the sequel, uses the term awning. Pity no-one noticed before it was published…

Why Spellchecking Is Never Enough…

Errors compromise clarity and credibility, so it's crucial to proofread your writing after you've used a spellchecker.

Proofreading means finding spelling mistakes and 'typos' (typographical errors), making sure that you've written what you thought you wrote and said what you meant to say, and checking that you have expressed yourself as clearly and unambiguously as possible. Proofreading a piece of work carefully before publishing it helps to build a good relationship with your audience by demonstrating that you respect both your reader and yourself. It shows that you care what you publish, whether it's under your given name or a pseudonym — after all, if you can't be bothered to read through what you've written, why should anyone else?

This applies to any writing you send out into the world: a work email, an essay, a business proposal, a novel, a blog entry, a Facebook post…

Take applying for a job. Companies are inundated with emails for vacancies — sometimes hundreds for a single post — and you want yours to stand out for the right reasons. I once worked for a company that reduced applications to a manageable level by sorting them into two piles using simple criteria: in one pile went the well-presented CVs, while the other — which was always larger — was for applications that contained errors; these applicants were immediately sent a rejection letter. The logic was that if the applicants didn't check documents as important as their CVs and covering letters when they were chasing a job, they were unlikely to take the necessary care in checking documents they prepared for clients when they were safely in the job — and that, of course, would reflect badly on the company.

Proofreading versus spellchecking

A spellcheck is an excellent starting point for checking a piece of writing; it will flag spelling mistakes and (some) typographical errors, and will check even a large document quickly. If you've typed thier for their or neice for niece, the spellchecker will offer the correct spelling; some will correct such common errors automatically. The spellchecker will also ask you about words it doesn't recognize, and list possible replacements.

When you've run a spellcheck and corrected or checked any words the checker has flagged, it's time to proofread. This is best done on a printout, holding a pen and following the words as you read. (For even better results, read the text aloud to force yourself to read what is there, not what you think is there. When we read silently, our minds will often try to help by making minor corrections — for example, inserting an omitted, but crucial, not — when what we need is to focus on exactly what is written down.)

Remember that a spellchecker works by comparing the individual words (not phrases) in a document with a list of correctly-spelt words. It cannot and will not identify where you have typed the wrong word if that word is spelt correctly. A spellchecker will let through errors such as:

• Milton's Stan tempts Eve by flattening her.
• In Paradise Lost, Santa transforms into ever more lowly creatures.
• 'Satan Claus is coming to town…'
• Kuhn observes that a paradigm shit results in a paradigm that is both new and improved.
• The Roman forum was a pubic square used mainly as a marketplace.
• 'Its a long way to Tipperary…'
• Aesop tells a storey about how a tortoise beats a hair.
• 'Their is a house in New Orleans…'
• She tiptoed on bear feat.

… and many more.

A spellchecker won't find these mistakes. Proofreading is a must.


21 December 2012, Addendum
In case you think this is harsh, pedantic or plain pernickity, see Matthew Wardrop, 'My interests include cooking dogs'