Apologies in advance for the following moan, but I've been rather annoyed by a book!
I've not been reading as many books lately for a number of reasons, but mainly because I've been shaking the dust off the old grey matter and doing a training course. Reading the textbook for the latest module, though, has highlighted one of my real pet hates as a reader - poor proofing.
The text book I've been wading through has been the worst example I've ever seen of poor proofing and, as you can imagine, I've read quite a few books in my time (even though I've bought more!). This book is supposed to be the official, standard text and is published by the qualification's awarding body, but it is truly horrendous and would be an embarrassment to any sane organisation. There are spelling mistakes, random words in random places, malapropisms and whole sections of text repeated for no good reason. I even found one paragraph so badly written that I can't actually understand it at all! In places, it's almost as if someone has used a machine that types as you dictate and then not bothered to read it through afterwards.
Studying for a qualification at any age is rather stressful and having to translate everything into English before I can begin to understand it really isn't helpful. There's only a 50% pass rate for the whole course and I'm beginning to wonder if this awful writing is why.
Speaking more broadly, I'm glad to say that I don't see books this bad very often (maybe I've led too sheltered a life!), but I do think that I've seen more and more typos in books over the last few years. Perhaps its my imagination, but I wonder if others feel the same? To be fair, the one's I've seen are usually minor, but there has been the odd novel that I've been tempted to correct and send back to the publishers. So far I've resisted!!
No matter how minor, however, these sorts of errors do distract from the content and, in a strange way, make me feel disappointed that the producers of the book didn't afford it the care and respect offered by most readers. A book is a chunk of someone's life, a creation which draws on their personality, experience, heart and soul. It's like getting inside someone's head and probably the nearest you can get to mind reading. Consequently, it's valuable and precious and worthy of respect. So when a publisher fails to look after it properly and allows it out into the world without proper proofing, it's just a bit annoying!
There we go, rant over! Now back to translating...!
