What happens when book editors goof??

babsatamelia- I usually cannot even write a paragraph on A2K without making at least one mistake. I would assume, that when an author writes a book, the editors proof read it so that there are minimal mistakes, although I am sure that a few slip by, from time to time. In a web page written by pros, you would probably have the same sort of oversight.

On web sites written by, let us say, casual web page producers, I would assume that you would find PLENTY of mistakes!

Skirting the main issue, I worry very much about some of the internet sources cited. When someone uses a book as a source, the can do it with reasonable assurance the text on the page is going to be exactly the same the next time it is used. If you would like to call this post moronic, I can change it to idiotic, and unless you have copied it (and not changed it yourself), who would be the wiser?

My Mrs catches them all the time. But don't sorry it hasn't rubbed off on me! :-)

Of course, we expect textbooks to be correct, as correct as is
humanly possible. What I am getting at......is that people have
become sloppy.....and even textbooks are being printed with
more errors in them. I read about this in the paper a year or
so ago, & it still bothers me. If it were a college text, a professor
might catch it. But what if he doesn't, or didn't? What if errors
are quoted, cited, accepted, and are bookmarked into eternity?
I know this sounds silly, but isn't sloppy work why General
Motors is having a harder time selling their cars?

I would like to think that people like you,babsatamelia, would bring the errors to the attention of the publishers and I would also like to think that they'd change them. May be wishful thinking on my part, but I can hope.

Unfortunately, the people who recoginize the mistakes (particularly as it pertains to history) seem to be disappearing. I point to any number of surveys which have shown that basically our kids are not being taught dates, geography, events, etc.

Incidentally, when my son was in 5th grade the local Yellow Book phone book sponsored a contest in which the kids were asked to find errors on the map they provided with each Yellow Book. My son won the contest with something like 30 errors. I often wondered if they ever corrected them.

But sad to say, history is a topic that I suck at. This is why
it is so important to me that someone, somewhere keeps
up with things like that. I shall have to look it up if I need
information, and I would hate to think that I couldn't trust
the source.
I AM very good with drugs though. I constantly spotted
errors as my fellow pharmacists made patient's
a recommendations that made NO sense , just ignorant &
untrue. Their problem was that they went to pharmacy school
in Florida or Georgia. I, on the other hand went to Pitt.
The thing about cold meds is that there are so many
of them, but....the trick is, they are all basically the
same. The SANE ones have an antihistamine and a
decongestant AND they last for 12 hours AND they do not
make you fall asleep. There are very few good ones.
Most have added things which you do not need like
acetaminophen (tylenol) aspirin, caffeine, etc.
If you get a fever, you know what to do about it, so
there is no sense having it added in a cold remedy.
As a pharmacist, retired, well, disabled with RA, actually
for past 6 years.
Just don't ask me about the really new drugs
I am out of the loop now.

Errors in books and things may last for a while but they are usually caught and the publisher incorporates the correction into the next printing. That, of course, doesn't eliminate the problem of the originals being in circulation but I don't know that it has to much long term impact.

Someone could quote the incorrect info but people who do indepth research in the specific area would come across the error. They would also be looking at multiple sources so they would note the differences in the references and then dig deeper to resolve the discrepancy. I've run across this type of thing in doing my own genealogy research several times.

If an author/editor/publisher had problems repeatedly they gain a reputation for it and thier work becomes a shunned source.

Have you seen a picture of Michaelangelo's "Moses"? It is a beautiful work of sculpture, but Moses is depicted with horns. It seems that the translation of the Bible in use in Michaelangelo's time made an error and said that Moses had horns on his head. (I believe the modern translation says he had rays of light on his head)

If you can't even trust the Bible to get the facts right, what chance do historians have?

Especially when looking at old (European/German) history books from the end of the 19th century, you'll find always some pages of "errata".

But today, well, fishin' said it correctly: either an author/editor/publisher has a reputation or she/he hasn't.

Very good point there, fishin. They would no doubt
be out of business if errors were printed and caught
printed and caught.....writers and educators may
begin to see the publishing company as not very
reliable, and hence go to a more reputable firm.

I've written a few textbooks. But I make a living editing and proofreading texts as well as other kinds of books.

The chances of errors creeping in are far greater these days than they were in the past. There are now fewer stages in the production of a book than there used to be. That in itself is a big reason for seeing more mistakes. But the biggest problem from my perspective as a proofreader is that editors are inexperienced, poorly trained, and just plain ignorant. I've been hired by publishers to "fix" books that have already been edited and proofread.

I have found and fixed hair-raising errors as a proofreader. I mean hair-raising. Finding errors as an editor is more common. The editor is the first professional to take a look at the material.

Hair-raising.

I wish i shared the confidence expressed by many here. I've seen far too many errors, however. And i do believe that the standards, especially for text books, are deteriorating. I knew of a doctoral candidate who, in his thesis, used the terms mentors and "mentees"--when i suggested to him that this was an awkward construct, the there is no verb in English, "to ment," he asked where the hell i thought the noun came from. His tone was superior and sneering--he was the PhD candidate, not i. So, sneering in my turn, i told him the story of Mentor and Telemachus, and asked him if he'd never read the Odyssey. He didn't care, and felt assured those reviewing his thesis would not know. Sadly, he was probably correct in the latter assumption. I used to read history text books when bored, to see how many errors i could spot. In the late 1960's and early 1970's, this would run to about one per chapter, or about once every 20-25 pages. By the 1980's, it had reached one glaring error in about every 5 pages, and ommissions or gross errors of interpretation on virtually every page. I gave it up, because it angered and dismayed me.

Whether or not the politically correct will like to hear this, our standards of education went to hell in the late 1960's, and the process has not been reversed, but has, in fact, deteriorated since then. Political rectitude is at the heart of much of this. "PC" attitudes have made nonsense of teaching history (thou shalt not say the least critical thing of any group with an agenda), and such attitudes have made a major, successful assault on what were previous standards of learning and accumulated wisdom, much as petulant adolescents would review a curriculum, simply throwing things out without replacing them. Feminist sneers about DWEM's (dead white european males) mean that those works once known as "the great books," are "out of vogue." The dimwitted PhD candidate had nothing to fear--his profs had never read The Odyssey, nor The Illiad, for that matter--because they did not read it in the home, and no university ever required it of them.

Lest one think i'm only beating up on the educational system, i would add that i'm appalled at the language standards, and knowledge of culture and history of editorial staffs these days, as well. A well-known science fiction author recently published a highly-touted work, published by a prestigious house in that field, and there was an entire chapter which i could not read without cringing. In that chapter, a central character of the larger narrative is introduced, but the main character of this chapter is a "Quaker." The author completely screwed up the second person singular--using thee (which is the objective) for thou (the subjective), and vice-versa--and, obviously, no proof-reader or editor had sufficient education to catch the error. This may have been the most egregious example, but i see blatant errors which no editor has caught, all of the time.

Phoenix has said that she makes typos when typing here. So do i. And working in offices in one capacity or another all of my life, i've known for years that you need three or four people to read an important text, and then you need to have the text re-read by all concerned, perhaps re-read twice or thrice. Then you need to find someone not yet involved, and have him/her read the text. As for the "PC disease" and the death of our cultural heritage--i have no answer for that.

Hear. Hear. Political Correctness may be the death of civilization. Okay, tha't a bit of a reach, but it certainly has made hash of taught history. The whole concept that history should serve some higher ideological purpose smacks of 1984. I think I know my own limitations as a historian, but when bright young history students screw up the most elemental facts and interpret their errors to reach conclusions that are laughable, I begin to wonder. I greatly admire Johnson's Birth of the Modern, and have been impressed with his scholarship in other historical works. However, when I read his History of the American People, my estimation plumeted. Johnson, generally a first rate historian couldn't keep track of the military leadership of the Union and Confederate forces, i.e., seemed to think there was only one General Johnson in the Confederacy. To compound matters, no one caught the glaring mistakes.

i'm generally somewhat forgiving of the failings found in High School History classes. How can one adequately cover hundreds and even thousands of years of human activity in hour long classes that last only a brief semester, or two? Teachers have to catch the attention of children whose hormons are kicking in, and whose top values consist of who is dating who. Parents are ancient and irrelevant, so what does that make the Peloponisian War? Generally high school teachers have degrees in Education, and with a little luck a minor in History. Who teaches history in the Universities? The college radicals of the Sixties who never left academic life, and who haven't learned anything from the failures of idealism. I remember a high school History class that was taught by the football coach. Then, as Setanta and other's have pointed out, the texts are truly terrible. Riddled with errors and selected by school boards more interested in PC than in "objective" study of history, most of the texts are worse than having no text at all.

This is a topic that can easily lead to ranting.

OH NO! Here is what I most fear,
Equus confirms that errors from Moses days
are here to remind us of the human condition to err
And my friend from afar, Walter confirms with
the story of errors in Germany's history texts.
Who can we trust, if Michaelangelo was misled???

Wow Roberta - and "write" from the
horse's mouth - an editor!
I see you're a newbie, and I sure
am glad you're here. A very fond
welcome into the A2K family. Love
your avatar. Go get 'em, my lady!
Somebody needs to whip these writers into
ship shape, or make them behave
or at least try harder.....good grief!

Setanta and Asherman seem to both have seen,
a swath of errors cutting across the width & breadth
of history..... and I am so lamenting the loss of proof,
proof reading, of proof keeping, loss of concern, loss
of "facts". For within a fact, one expects to contain
a little golden nugget of "truth". Even though there may
be little else here on earth to reassure us about truths
of any other kind or nature...... I would still like to be
able to look up a history text & see how many General
Johnsons there were during the Civil War. My dear Mr
Asherman, please explain to me, if you will - this concept
of "history should serve some higher ideological purpose???"
What higher purpose could there be than to represent the
facts; as clearly, correctly and concisely as possible?

Babs, Thanks for your kind welcome. And I'm glad you like my avatar. It spoke to me from the hundreds of others.

There are different kinds of editing. The only time I get to whip authors into shape is when I'm hired as a developmental editor. Developmental editors really dig into content, organization, substance, and factual information. When I worked for a very large publishing house, all texts had a developmental edit. Now most do not. Such editing is time-consuming and expensive.

Copy editing barely gives me a chance to do much of anything. But I can make sure that facts are backed with sources and that the language is right, the words in the glossary are in alphabetic order, and that things in general make sense.

By the time something is at the proofreading stage, it's very late in the game to be making substantive changes. Most editors I work for don't want this. But sometimes I can't help myself. Mistakes in English alone are enough to make me wail and gnash my teeth.

One horror story: I was asked to survey a published text to correlate its content with some national standards. Part One, page 1--a full-color photo of Jackie Joyner Kersee (sp?) with a caption stating that she won gold at the 1980 Olympics!! Gag. Not only was Jackie probably a toddler in 1980, but the US did not participate in the Olympics that year.

Editors do make corrections as books are reprinted. But if they don't know about an error, the book will retain it for its entire printed life.

Errors in textbooks are usually picked up by the College Professors who use the books.
As far as advanced texts, common errors have been picked up by graduate students doing research.

Please don't expect me to defend this particular brand of history. History isn't just studied, but the study of how and why history is studied has long been a part of the discipline. Toynbee's Study of History is but one well-known text of this sort.

It has long been recognized that the Truth of any Historical event is elusive. How do we know History? Basically there are two ways: by the oral telling of it, and by written records. Preliterate societies rely upon memory, and folk tradition to pass important historical knowledge from one generation to the next. Homer's Odyssey and Iliad are examples, though "Homer" may actually have been a whole bunch of wandering poets/storytellers/minstrels. Sometimes oral history can be very accurate, but more frequently the facts are hidden in poetic language and exaggeration. Historians tend to discount oral histories unless they are from very near the source of the actual event, or can be verified by secondary sources.

History begins with writing and the keeping of records. The earliest writing gives us detailed information about "how many/much". Not long after the advent of bookkeepers and taxmen, the human propensity to sing began to be written down. We have a number of poems from the early written records of Sumaria and Egypt. What did those early people sing of? Love and War were the dominant themes. Military History was born. Can we trust those early records? The answer is a very, very qualified perhaps. Leaders who want to be remembered have a tendency to exaggerate their prowess. I'm beginning to stray.

Written records can never give us the whole Truth of an event. Witnesses see only a part of the action, and being a part of the event affects the way witnesses interpret what happened. If witnesses record the event contemporaneously, or shortly after the event, their emotions will color their report. Most often witnesses record the event long after it occurred, and then faulty memory and wishful thinking corrupt the truth of the matter. Some witnesses may consciously lie, and may never have been within knowing distance of the event they purport to record. Translation from one language to another presents another hurtle. As time passes the number of written records of an event begin to vanish. Stone tablets are broken up to use in building outhouses. Books are burned to heat bathwater. Water dissolves paper, or it self-destructs from the slow combustion of wood products out of which the paper was manufactured. Hard drives crash.

History is largely a matter of interpretation. We gather as many facts as possible, from as many sources as possible, and then we try to make a sensible stab at understanding what happened, who was involved, and what the importance of the event was. If history is the interpretation of events by a "historian", then we need to understand what their prejudices are/were. Why did a historian choose one interpretation over another? What was the writer's purpose for telling about some historical event(s)? What is the purpose of Historical writing? Historians have a whole range of answers to those questions, and fashion sometimes sweeps through the intellectual community.

During the mid to late 20th century many academic historians came to believe that History is useful as a means of changing, improving society. Historical facts are not so much denied, or hidden, but the meaning of historical events are interpreted according to the needs of society. Who determines what society needs? Political Ideology? The Great Unwashed? Professors foolish or wise, well meaning, or not?

"We are involved in a great cause, the building of a better world. A world where hate is abolished. No one will do without all the basic needs. No one need be a criminal. We want to build a world where the natural environment just gets better and better. To build that better world, we must as the teachers of history emphasize the lessons of a corrupted past, filled with crimes committed by depraved despots. We must underscore the essential goodness of the those that history has in the past ignored because they weren't important to the story that the powerful wanted told."

Sound familiar?