[SteveEisenberg]

Getting back to errors:

Spelling and punctuation errors, if I notice them (and I mostly don't), can be distracting. But they pale in significance to content errors, such as a nonfiction book ignoring the best previous scholarship on the subject, or a character, in a novel, behaving out of character without an explanation. Another plot error that has peeved me is someone dying in quicksand. Since it is almost impossible to drown in quicksand (one floats), I've have the experience of expecting to find out the death was faked, but then, in the end, it wasn't, either because the author is ignorant of quicksand's properties, or thinks we readers are.

In general, the more one could argue back and forth over whether an error is really an error, the worse it probably is. And the more unambiguous the error, the more trivial it is. This is one reason I can't see myself complaining over proofreading errors.