Today the number 36 inspires both gratitude and annoyance: gratitude for my colleague who found 36 errors in the draft of an academic essay I'm revising and annoyance at myself for having overlooked those errors. And now I'm wondering: how many times in the past have I let similar errors slip past my eagle eyes?
I'm in the final stages of revision of a 30-page article I've been working on for a few years, and given the number of times I've fiddled with it, I'm not surprised that some errors slipped in. The publication that asked for the revision insists that every quotation be compared word-for word with its source, something I would have been willing to do myself if I hadn't had my hands full with the grandkids and the sick Dad and the start of classes and--oh, just everything.
Truth be told, I didn't want to do it. I've worked as an editor and I pride myself on taking very careful notes and transcribing quotations accurately, so I doubted that the effort of double-checking the quotes would result in much improvement; however, I didn't want to risk having the article rejected at this late stage, so I asked a former student, now a junior colleague, if he'd like to earn a little spare cash by doing some quote-checking. He was happy to accept the challenge to find all my mistakes.
I am embarrassed to admit that he found 36 problems in my very carefully proofread and edited 30-page document. He found a source listed in the Works Cited that wasn't actually cited in the paper, and he pointed out a sentence that, as he so tactfully put it, was "missing some things to make it grammatically sound." The other 34 were errors in transcribing quotes or citing the correct page numbers.
Many of the errors are pretty inconsequential: "to" for "into," "on" for "upon," and "insofar" where the source had "in so far," an error possibly introduced by cursed autocorrect. In several spots I messed up the punctuation in a quotation, leaving out commas or changing a semicolon to a colon, but nevertheless the meaning remained intact.
In five cases, though, my error led to significant misrepresentation of the original quote, and while five is a small number, I am embarrassed that I did not notice how seriously I'd damaged these quotations. Maybe a "drying jellyfish" is not much different from a "dying jellyfish," but if the source says "dying," then "drying" won't do. Elsewhere, I changed "squirming" to "squirting," which actually makes a little more sense in context but, again, is not the word the author wrote. In another quotation I somehow changed "writer" to "reader," which was bad enough, but I'm more concerned about the two spots in which I inadvertently changed "entailment" to "entanglement," which will require some serious thinking and possible revision since the concept of "entanglement" is so central to the essay that it appears in the title.
This process cost me a few bucks but it was definitely worth the money, not only because it revealed the work I still need to do to revise the essay but also because it provided a cautionary dose of humility. I notice errors all the time--in my students' papers, my colleagues' e-mails, and in newspaper articles and billboards and Facebook posts--and it always makes me cringe when I go back and read something I've written and notice obvious mistakes. Now, though, I'm reminded that the mistakes I notice may be just the tip of the iceberg. How many invisible errors have I released into the world over the years? How many times have I inadvertently altered a quote enough to misrepresent its meaning?
I warn my students about accuracy of quotations all the time, but this time the tables were turned: a former student showed me just how easy it is to alter a quote and just how much I should value the services of a quote-checker. I'll be calling on him again. (But first, let's finish revising this essay.)
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