Progress?

I’ve been reading a book for the sheer delight the last several days. Or at least, it started for the sheer delight but has become something more. This author, an international phenom with a string of best sellers, has always been dependable for action and mystery, compelling characters and unexpected plot turns. And absolutely reliable in the sense of providing reading for entertainment that required little introspection, that transported me to a fascinating but utterly disposable world of what if. The author has been a great benefactor for the frequent flier.

The author has taken a different path in this book, electing to use it as a vehicle for explication of a certain personally held philosophy. The book does a great and subtle job of displaying the fallacies and potential horrors of utilitarian ethics and promoting the fundamental truth that even in the calculus of greatest good for the greatest number, the individual must remain sovereign. Even the greatest end does not justify a means that includes violation of the rights of the individual.

I’ve really enjoyed this book on several levels. It was a great read, as they say and also a thought-provoking experience.

By now you know there’s a ‘but’ coming, a ‘however’ that justifies the tone of this missive and the fact that I’m hiding the names of book and author. After all, if I wanted to recommend the book outright, I’d do so. I will later in another post, where I can hide the connection to this blog.

Here’s the rub: The book is badly edited. Ba-a-a-adly edited. I started to become leery at about the third misspelling. Then, I caught syntax errors that couldn’t be explained by lingua franca or regional voice. The real tip-off came when I noticed the frequency of redundancies.

This book wasn’t exposed to the ministrations of a competent copy editor. They used a program! Perhaps even one as lightweight as the spell and grammar checker in standard word processing software.

Living where I do, I’m surrounded by the folks who write many of the standard office programs (get it? Office programs?) that most of us use. And from close association with them, I can tell you that perhaps the smartest thing one can do if you enjoy writing and value proper usage is to disable the supplied language / usage monitor. The folks who write those programs are the same ones who have turned ‘access’ to a verb form and pronounce tilde with a long ‘e.’ They mean well but don’t get it. They don’t understand the gulf of difference between computer language and language.

So, back to the book in question. The errors are all consistent with the use of a program rather than a human. The misspellings were all of the type that software doesn’t catch – a misspelling of the intended word that is still a legitimate word in its own rite. The redundancies would have been caught by a competent copy editor but were entirely hidden to a program designed to find and delete only literal and proximate word repetitions.

There may well be some of you thinking I’m a prig and of course, you’d be right. But I’m not writing this merely for the sake of priggishness. I believe in good writing. I wish I could write as well as the author in question. So it hurts me physically to see this author’s writing corrupted by what had to have been a bean-counting decision to cut out the cost of an adept and sensitive copy editor.

The true tragedy here has nothing to do with me. Well, okay. It’s somewhat about me or I wouldn’t have written this post. But it has more to do with the general dumbing down of, well, everything that’s part and parcel of our descent into reliance on others. The others in this case made some bad decisions.

When I’m teaching process, one refrain I always include, several times in a multi-day class, is that tools are good for organizing and displaying information but people should make the decisions. The more we leave the decisions to the tools, the riskier the proposition becomes.

When we trust the tool, we trust the tool maker. And in the case in question, an experienced copy editor with a passion for great writing is infinitely more trustworthy than a programmer with an English degree.

Relying on ‘editors’ employed to create lowest-common-denominator software filters rather than engaging professionals isn’t progress, it’s surrender. I’m not ready to wave a white flag.