When Ted and I were first married, I worked for three years as a writer-editor for the U.S. Bureau of the Census. I was one of three writer-editors in the department where I worked, and the expectation was perfection in print. This was in the early 1970s, before PCs and spell check. After writing and before publishing, we worked in a proofreading team of three, taking turns with one of us reading aloud and two following along looking for errors. A lasting result of that job is that it sometimes spoils pleasure reading for me because I’m so well-trained to find errors in text. (Not to mention being a grammar nerd with two college degrees in English.)
I’ve found lots of textual errors over the years, including factual errors such as the lady who took a coach from London to Dublin (not easy over the Irish Sea), as well as simple misspellings of homonyms and other “real” words that don’t make sense in the text, but don’t trigger spell check.
I found two pretty big errors within a few pages of each other while reading Robin Cook’s Foreign Body over the weekend.
Octaves go higher and lower in tone, not louder in volume. Let’s replace “octaves” with “decibels” here.
She’s flying from Los Angeles to Delhi, India. Depending on when you leave (orbital distance can vary), it only takes 7 months to get to Mars!