Rewrite Problems. Shakespeare may never have blotted a line, but most writers write once and rewrite several times. Sometimes the approach changes but the grammar doesn't follow. That may be what happened to a headline of an Associated Press story hilited on Netscape.com today: "Tsunami Rebuilding Effort Face Obstacles". That is a block-copy quote. I did not retype it.
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Word processors empower us to make only the changes to written text while leaving the remainder as it was. That's a great convenience but also a danger. In the olden days (when I was young), there were no word processors. If you wanted a neatly typed final document, you either had to type it once and leave it as it first came out, or retype the entire page, during which retype you would likely catch shifts in grammar, and conform the entire phrase. Because there were no spellcheckers nor grammar-checking programs, publishers also employed proofreaders and copy editors to review every writer's manuscripts.
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Now, however, spellcheckers and grammar checkers give us false confidence that the final text we produce is error-free. Guess again.
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Everybody makes mistakes, and it's always a good idea, especially in important documents, to have a second pair of eyes — or third, or fourth — review any important text. But a lot of professionals, even lawyers, who should know to have someone else look at what they have written, think they can do their own work and finalize it themselves. Who needs a secretary, or proofreader, or copy editor?
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When I worked as a word processor for lawyers, I caught innumerable errors that would have gone out to courts and adversaries if the document hadn't gone thru me. If the Associated Press, the world's largest organization of professional journalists, can make a glaring error, anyone can. Employers who stint on secretaries and proofreaders run the risk of epitomizing the adage "Penny wise, pound [dollar] foolish."
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,622.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:33 PM