Will my mistakes ‘keep the professors busy for centuries’?

Allan Trott's (mistake-free?) knot garden at Ashburton in Aotearoa/New Zealand

When I asked my wife what she thought of my most recent book, The Sceptical Botanist, Lynda said she’d only flipped through but all good so far. Oh, and there were a couple of surnames misspelled.

Everyone who gets feedback – public or private – is waiting for the sting in the tail. It doesn’t matter how gushing the praise, a single ‘but’, ‘if only’ or ‘it would have been better’ turns a barely contained smirk into a simpering smile.

The reviews have been (so far) positive and generous, but I can’t find quickly enough the inevitable qualified word of praise or gentle rebuke. 

A recent review was very kind but, sure enough, just near the end, the mention of ‘an unfortunate blemish’. Between squinted eyes, I read on. ‘Poor copy editing’ the reviewer said, ‘had left a large number of typographical errors’.

I knew there were more than Lynda found – another reviewer had mentioned a couple more misspelt surnames – but what did large mean? One is too many, but to be expected. A handful, irritating but perhaps understandable.

Based on reader feedback, I know there are at 10 errors among my 80,000 words. Undoubtedly there are more, but so far that’s 99.99% error-free! A light sprinkling – a seasoning – rather than a deluge. 

Still, it is irritating. Spelling is my Achilles heel (and yes, I had to look up Achilles – just to check mind you). Not that I’m a bad speller, just an average speller who is also a sloppy and inattentive writer. At least in the first draft.

I’ll put ‘east’ when I mean ‘west’, or ‘their’ when it should be ‘there’ or spell a surname (or botanical name) three different ways in the same sentence. I type quickly, too (I originally typed ‘to’) quickly, which I blame on a typing elective in early secondary school. While I mostly know the correct spelling or usage, in my haste to get a sentence to print, I allow my fingers to overrule my brain. 

You would think I’d take more care with names. And I do, in emails and formal letters, proudly looking up the correct spelling when in doubt. Anyone called ‘Entwisle’ – not ‘Entwhistle’ or ‘Entwistle’ – is aware that names are not always spelt as they should be. 

But when I settle into the writing of a long book, the words tumble out faster than the processing speed of my rather weak spelling brain. That’s a fact.

Which is all fine and the errors can be picked up in the next edit, or the one after that. But as anyone who writes a lot knows, there are mistaken words that persist no matter how often your read through. Sometimes camouflaged at the end a line, sometimes hiding in plain sight. That’s why getting someone else to read and edit is essential.

And why book publishers employ copy editors, to fix the mistakes an author cannot see or is incapable of seeing. Perhaps surprisingly, I was employed as a freelance copy editor early in my career. I worked for CSIRO Publishing, reading through manuscripts submitted to scientific journals. Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t much good at it, and we parted company after a few months. 

Even with a good copy editor, mistakes persist. While the reviewer in this instance politely (from my perspective) blamed the copy editor for the typos, of course it was the author – me – that put them there. My inattention, my distraction, my ineptitude. 

Does it matter? I am an aggressive editor myself, ranting and raving about poor sentences and unclear logic in someone else’s writing. I also judge a book (unfairly?) when I find the first spelling mistake or repeated word. It can’t be unread. 

The other part of me – the writer, rather than the reader or editor – thinks it matters less. We almost always know what an author means, even when they could have said it better or more correctly. Maybe typos will become a celebration of human intellect as an increasingly mistake-free AI replaces mundane writing tasks; a form of wabi-sabi, the Japanese concept of finding beauty in imperfection?

So far, I have not deliberately included misspellings. Although, I did once use a clunky sentence construction to emphasise the uncomfortableness of the content. I don’t know in anyone got that, but it did feel rather literary!

James Joyce famously said of his second-most difficult book, Ulysses: ‘‎I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that is the only way of insuring one's immortality.’ 

For me, allowing readers to seek out all my misspellings might be the closest I get to immortality as a writer. Either that or I get Lynda to read my next book before it’s submitted and stick with an occasional obscure reference to Nick Cave or some other favourite musician or song. Just to amuse the professor(s) mind you.

The author correcting typos in Armidale