2013/10/11

the latest book I am reading

Right now I am reading a book entitled, "Once Upon a Climb," about a man's journey up the Appalachian Trail. I am enjoying the book despite a few problems.

Poor punctuation; misplaced commas, mostly.

Misspellings, such as "loose" when he clearly means "lose".  Twice, so far.

And what must be auto-correct errors, such as "at last" being rendered as "Atlas" twice so far.

These errors aren't terribly abundant, but they are distracting. Not enough to put down the book, though. There have been a couple of books that I have tried to read in the past that I had to put down after only a chapter or two because they were so badly punctuated.

v---------- Added 13 October 2013 ----------v

For some reason I can't post comments on my own blog, so I'm tacking this onto the original post.

In response to Uzza, the copyright is 2005 and the publisher is Booklocker.com, which appears to be a vanity publisher. This copy is evidently from the first printing,

The worst screwup I've found so far is when recite is spelled receipt in two successive sentences within a single paragraph, along with a misplaced apostrophe, viz:

"When he learned of my fascination with [Robert W.] Services' (sic) works, he asked me to receipt (sic) a piece. As he followed me back to the trailhead, I receipted (sic) The Cremation of Sam McGee."
It seems pretty obvious to me that the word has to be recite, as receipt makes no sense whatsoever in this context.

Robert W. Service is described in the book as, "the bard of many poems and ballads concerning the gold rush of the Yukon Territories." Possessive of Service is Service's, not Services'.

1 comment:

  1. When was the book printed? Recently I'll bet. I realize America is getting dumber, but it is one of life's great mystery how people can possibly confuse two words that don't sound alike, don't look alike, aren't spelled the same and don't have remotely similar meanings.

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