im thinking of publishing thiss Article without mis takes
I recently read an article that lamented some good advice. The good advice was to publish without mistakes. The reason the good advice was ignored was because the author (of the good advice) said that all the scrolls out there published with mistakes were detracting from the brill stuff published flawlessly by him. That’s a difficult opinion to substantiate and we need advanced logarithms to prove it, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is not to get angry when we, the self-published, are told to self-publish well. Official publishing houses are full of guys and gals publishing stuff without mistakes and they do it because they are well versed in what is mistakeless. Whether we like it or not, whether we are great believers in flux, noticeable mistakes still exist today and they are myriad. If we avoid them, we do ourselves and others a great favour.
I am lucky. I am old. I grew up studying mistakes. I got a degree in English. I went on to teach in further and adult education. It was when I got to Italy and the University of Rome that I marked six times a year exam scripts that drove me mad. I came to hate error-filled writing. I now live in Thailand where the Thais pride themselves on their ability to speak English. I sometimes think they do it merely to show us farangs (gringos) how backward we are because we don’t speak Thai like they speak English. Ironically, they can’t say a sentence without filling it full of grating mistakes. For example, last night a Thai mum was saying to her Thai daughter “Raining” as I passed them by, cussing because I had forgotten my umbrella.
Now it doesn’t take much to realise that Word, the programme, is corrective. It doesn’t take long to realise that by installing Grammarly you can do yourself a favour if your school-English is yobbing you in the face, so the literary friend and novelist who four-letter resented the fact that books with errors don’t do self-published authors a favour is iring away irrelevantly.
Of course it is better to publish correctly.
I understand that Shakespeare who wrote his name as Shakespeer or Shakspeer or Shakespear or Shakespeere would be a great writer by any other name but standardised spelling came into existence after him and why should self-published authors not adhere? Why should the self-published resort to four-lettering those who tell us we are doing no one a favour by publishing typos? I just don’t understand the anger unless it can be explained by a feeling of being threatened or by the presumptuous and proud resenting the presumptuous and proud.
Yeats told us:
“Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;”
and though criticised for elitism and fascism the great poet was simply telling us to study great stuff and keep singing / writing (well). Why should the self-published world ignore the rules and publish mistakes? OK, I know that CreateSpace tells us to publish our words our way (and Frank Sinatra, an early prophet of CreateSpace, sang the same - “I did it my way”) but we ignore the official world of publishing at our peril, and that official world, full of “backward” publishing houses like Faber & Faber with its English graduates and its greats like T. S. Eliot, is not ready (as yet) to ackcept wotever we wont to giv it!
#selfpublishing#opinion#typos#correctness#advice#ontheblog#creativewriting
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