Quote:
Originally Posted by CRussel
Clearly, shoot yourself to put yourself out of your own misery. (Really, we know it's always autocorrect at fault. )
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Human autocorrect tends to come in proofreading.
You're trying to to proof your own work. It has typos, but your mind knows what it's
supposed to say, and what you
see is the correct version, not what's on the page. (This bites software developers reviewing code, too. Your code won't compile, you are tearing out your hair trying to figure out why, and an associate looks for 30 seconds and says "You left out a statement terminator, here..."
)
Spell checkers and the like help but do not eliminate the problem, especially in edge cases. Late SF/F writer John Brunner told a story about a book of his. It was in the days when manuscripts were still submitted as hard copy. He had usages in the book that were deliberate, and he
knew a copy editor would try to "correct". So he printed the submission draft in proper form with wide margins and double spacing, and went through it and carefully circled all of the instances and wrote
STET! in the margin before sending it off.
He got the galley proofs to review and sure enough,
every instance had been "corrected". We were left concluding that a professional copy editor at the publisher didn't know what STET meant.
______
Dennis