First Word

The perfect picture and view from the historical site lakeside.   Style, usage and grammar mistakes galore. Where did I see these mistakes? In a casual email? On a text? On a sign somewhere? No, not exactly. I saw these mistakes "littering" the historical signage sprinkled along a trail in Tahoe City to celebrate the town's 150th anniversary. At the end of the tour, I noticed that the local rotary club got credit for the signs. At that point I realized the "road to messed-up signs is paved in good community intentions but weak grammarians." Now to the average eye the mistakes wouldn't necessarily leap off the signs, but to the well-trained eye the errors flew off those plaques. Misused commas in strange places, no hyphenation on words that should have been hyphenated -- those two mistakes were the most common. I can only imagine how many corrections a professional editor would have left behind on that copy had one only had his or her hands on it. I imagi...

Why do I always know the answer to that question? Want to know the number one blunder smaller self- and traditional publishers make? (I can actually name the offenders, too, but I'll be polite.) Littering the books with editorial mistakes. I can't tell you how many authors (and this applies to the big overseas publishing houses, too) show me their books only to have earmarked dozens of mistakes. In my opinion though the worst mistakes are the egregious and "ew-producing" back-cover mistakes. I'll be fair, a small handful of interior mistakes I can halfway accept, but the minute I see a back-cover with mistakes galore, I am always flabbergasted. The editors couldn't even take two seconds to ensure the most-read part of the book and THE most important part of the book didn't have mistakes? The only word that comes to mind is "sloppy" ... well, I can think of some other words too like "lame," but you know let's not digress. Why does th...

My favorite rebuke of 3L Publishing's editorial services comes from professional journalists, English teachers or editors who swear in stone they don't need our editorial services. This declaration always leaves me smiling like the all-knowing publisher that I am. Let me entertain you now with true confessions: I (the publisher and professional editor) NEED a proofreader ! Shock! Awe! No ... you ? Yes, me. Let me take this a step further: I don't care if you're a Pulitzer Prize winner for literature, guess what? You still need a proofreader. I have said this in the past to help laypeople understand how hard it is to proofread, so I will use the analogy again: Imagine taking a huge jar of 100,000 black jellybeans. Now take those black jellybeans and spill them on a white table. Now go look for the flawed beans. You will find you have to pick each one up, look at it, and put it back, and so on. Friends, THAT is how difficult it is to perfect a manuscript with 100,000 ...