Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
While I do have sympathy for what you are saying, it is par for the course. If you are going to put your work out there then people will have opinions on what you have done. I have opinions on what Stephen King has been doing wrong lately - and I'm sure those opinions concern him greatly. 
So human errors are inexcusable but machine errors you are happy to ignore? Doesn't that strike you as a little unfair?
Surely it is the existence (and volume/severity) of errors that bother the reader, or not*, and the source of the errors should be irrelevant.
For myself, the story trumps everything else. If it is good and gets me in then I hardly notice errors. If not, my head spends its spare time finding all the things that are wrong with it.
* There are many readers that don't notice errors. The majority of my beta readers simply do not see most of the errors in my drafts. Most will pick up a few here and there, but that's all. (Which is fine, syntax and grammar errors are not what I'm looking for from beta readers.) Just one or two of my beta readers come close to finding what there is to find. |
Oh I see.
I get that most readers won't notice syntax. Heck, I don't notice it. I do notice wrong words and I would hope your betas would catch them.
Note:I am talking elementary school errors not college level errors.
Let me ask you this.
Would you read a book that had an average of one error per sentence? (Note:this guy's only language was English. )(Obvious human error) (This book had other problems too.)(Most of them stemmed from not actually seeing what the person he thought he was emulating was actually doing and deciding what he thought worked in SF would work in Fantasy because they are classified together as a main genre.)
Would you read a book that had an average of one error every three words? (The second one was more backwards phrasing and plurals.) (Guy wasn't making any sales and did ask me to look over his book.)(There is no telling how many errors I overlooked on the first page.)(No his first language was not English. )
I don't know about you, but why should I spend my hard earned money on something like that. I expect authors to be at least 3 quarters literate. The exception is if they are writing in a dialect. Fanny Flagg and Jeff Foxworthy come to mind. Both are great in small doses.
As to machine errors, they are usually consistent and after a bit, the brain automatically fills in the correct word.
Anyway, just one reader's opinion.