The editor fallacy

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by James_Wilde

"It's mission: to boldly go where no-one has gone before."

Style guides are written for non-fiction and for people for whom form is more important than content.

Knowing the difference between "its" and "it's" should be important to everybody. Writing "it's" (an abbreviation for "it is", or "it has") when you mean "its" ("belonging to it") is just plain ignorance.

[Soldim]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Knowing the difference between "its" and "it's" should be important to everybody. Writing "it's" (an abbreviation for "it is", or "it has") when you mean "its" ("belonging to it") is just plain ignorance.

Its indeed very important

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Knowing the difference between "its" and "it's" should be important to everybody. Writing "it's" (an abbreviation for "it is", or "it has") when you mean "its" ("belonging to it") is just plain ignorance.

This one is my nemesis!

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by James_Wilde

Put me in touch with an agent or publisher who is willing to take me on, and I'll happily put up with as much editing as anybody could wish.

Things *are* a wee bit different in the trenches from the ivory towers, aren't they?

All businesses routinely cut corners to get product out the door; the more careful and successful ones are hailed for their "lean" processes. The less careful or lucky ones struggle.
The one facet of self-publishing that traditionalists just don't seem to grasp is that for many projects the choice isn't between self-pubbing and trad-pubbing but between self-pubbing and not-pubbing. And when not-pubbing is not an option...

It's not an easy choice to go with "good enough" but it *is* a choice and it does not necessarily lead to disaster per-se.

As Adam Osbourne said: "Adequacy is sufficient."

[spindlegirl]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I'm another one of those exceptions. I simply don't care about cover images. I didn't care about them with physical books either. Reviews (or recommendations), product descriptions and prior read authors are the only factors for me when purchasing. Cover art can be quite beautiful sometimes, but it's also usually unrelated—and oftentimes downright misleading—noise. I tend to filter noise wherever possible.

Likewise, I am neutral about cover art, especially since being a Kindle user. The Kindle I use doesn't display the cover art in the listing of books in my library unless I hit the right button on the 5 way thing, and even then it is small and understated.

I also prefer the plain vanilla text of a book (except for actual illustrations). But books with tons of "images" in the folder that are nothing more than chapter header logos and a huge calligraphic first letter of a paragraph, it's just sticking extra "stuff" in there when all I ever pay attention to is the story. (my first ebook experience was Gutenberg, then MR and it kind of stuck)

There are very few books that I don't convert to my preferences anyway, and when I 'explode' epub, the first thing to go is the fancy chapter headers which bloat a book which has really 400K of text into a 5MB file. I recently reduced a book I bought to its actual text content from a bloated state. I think all of that superfluous nonsense is why publishers insist that ebooks "cost as much to produce" as a printed book

[teh603]

Originally Posted by Catlady

MLA guide is used primarily for academic papers, not fiction or general nonfiction. Chicago Manual of Style and Words into Type are the most well-known general purpose style guides.

I've only seen one teacher who used Chicago Style. Every other teacher and professor I've met, has claimed that MLA is the ultimate and final manual of form for some unspecified "good reasons."

Yes, I know its incredibly stupid of them to say so, but I'm just repeating what various people tried to hammer into my brain.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by teh603

I've only seen one teacher who used Chicago Style. Every other teacher and professor I've met, has claimed that MLA is the ultimate and final manual of form for some unspecified "good reasons."

Yes, I know its incredibly stupid of them to say so, but I'm just repeating what various people tried to hammer into my brain.

Again, for academic papers, yes, MLA is the bible. Of course that's what teachers want you to follow in an academic setting. But it is not the style guide of choice for general fiction and nonfiction.

[taosaur]

I think if the blog post in the OP had been submitted to a site with an editor, I wouldn't have ended up reading any of it and the world would be a better place.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by kennyc

This one is my nemesis!

It's really not hard to remember. None of the personal pronouns (my, his, her, its, ours, yours, theirs) have apostrophes. If you're not tempted to put an apostrophe in "his", there's really no reason why you should be tempted by "its" .

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It's really not hard to remember. None of the personal pronouns (my, his, her, its, ours, yours, theirs) have apostrophes. If you're not tempted to put an apostrophe in "his", there's really no reason why you should be tempted by "its" .

Oh pshaw, it's my nemesis I said, none of that matters. I know it, its still my nemesis!

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Oh pshaw, it's my nemesis I said, none of that matters. I know it, its still my nemesis!

"Priorities" being your nemesis' henchman, right?

[James_Wilde]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Knowing the difference between "its" and "it's" should be important to everybody. Writing "it's" (an abbreviation for "it is", or "it has") when you mean "its" ("belonging to it") is just plain ignorance.

Shit! You're right, Harry, and that's not a mistake I usually make. Sorry.

[6charlong]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It's really not hard to remember. None of the personal pronouns (my, his, her, its, ours, yours, theirs) have apostrophes. If you're not tempted to put an apostrophe in "his", there's really no reason why you should be tempted by "its" .

Ignoring what HarryT writes and typing too fast is what does it most of the time. Something I can't understand about this thread: is anyone writing without their spell checker? Word for Mac finds even those miscreant apostrophes.

I haven't studied English Literature for decades but does anyone know what writers like Defoe, Austen, the Brontes, Dickens and Twain did for an editor? Their language and styles are less consistent than edited modern books but they are still readable after all these years, still popular and still have something to add. I wonder, are we expecting too much of modern writers or too little of modern readers?

[DarkScribe]

Originally Posted by 6charlong

Ignoring what HarryT writes and typing too fast is what does it most of the time. Something I can't understand about this thread: is anyone writing without their spell checker? Word for Mac finds even those miscreant apostrophes.

I haven't studied English Literature for decades but does anyone know what writers like Defoe, Austen, the Brontes, Dickens and Twain did for an editor? Their language and styles are less consistent than edited modern books but they are still readable after all these years, still popular and still have something to add. I wonder, are we expecting too much of modern writers or too little of modern readers?

They had editors, there are several dedications to them in a number of first editions; but they also had less need for them. In those days standards with regard to language, to grammar, to sentence structure were much higher. Schools actually taught.

[teh603]

Originally Posted by 6charlong

Ignoring what HarryT writes and typing too fast is what does it most of the time. Something I can't understand about this thread: is anyone writing without their spell checker? Word for Mac finds even those miscreant apostrophes.

Sounds more like grammar check than spell check; none of the spell checkers I've seen would try to figure out which "its" to use. Course is also been my experience that the grammar checker is wrong more often than its right; it favors a short, choppy writing style.