Reason #14: Youre Speling is Atrowshus
(That's right, kids, to celebrate the end of the second week of the second month of International Slushpile Awareness Month, here's an all-new Reason with some slush references thrown in.)
There is a myth about publishing, propagated and regularly renewed by bad writers desperate to justify their futile reveries. The self-sustaining power of the myth is such that writers in its thrall cannot see, much less correct the basic problems in their writing -- problems so fundamental, the writers are forever doomed to get form rejections that don't alert them to how severe these problems are. This myth is:
Publishers employ copy editors to fix the spelling and grammar in your manuscript.
This myth is pervasive because in the most literal sense, it is true. Publishers do employ copy editors, and their role (in part) is to fix errors of spelling and grammar during a book's pre-publication phase. But in the funhouse mirror that is the bad writer's state of perpetual denial, this simple fact has been tortured into a comforting, yet utterly untrue corollary:
It dont mater how bad is my speling or grammar, cause thats' what copyeditors is for.
And thus a sizeable proportion of every slushpile is comprised of randomly, punctuate'd, fonetikly riten first drafts so bad, so head-shakingly wrong that they would make proofreaders weep and copyeditors resign, if they didn't initially make slush readers shudder with fear as they drop the submission into the Burn This pile.
I don't think it's much of a secret that this is the fault of the massive wussification of education in Western countries over the last forty years. After the peace movement of the 1960s, the powers that be decided that kids were getting too darn smart, and a smart kid was much less likely to say "sure Mister President, I'll spend six weeks learning to field-strip an M-16 and having my sense of self systematically destroyed so I can be sent to murder some poor, ill-trained conscripted suckers with a different skin color trying to defend their country with outdated weapons you sold to them before you decided that stealing their natural resources was cheaper than buying them". It's far easier to maintain a massive standing army ready to fight and die for no reason other than "the President says it's cool" if you don't teach them to think for themselves in the first place.
So, now we're on the second generation of kids who are getting a free pass through the school system while barely learning to read and write at a functional level. The frightening thing is that some of them still think they can be writers -- while the saddening thing is that if the education system was designed to develop intelligent and capable citizens instead of consumers and soldiers, they could have been writers.
Some of them (surely) have interesting lives, and strong ideas -- it's just that they lack the linguistic capability to express themselves, and what's left of today's reading public have less and less patience to wade through books that read like they were typed by throwing pebbles at a keyboard across the room.
And -- here's the kicker -- for the same reasons, skilled copyeditors are now rarer and more expensive than when your high-school-dropout granddaddy was nurtured by his publisher through a long and unremarkable midlist career. Publishers are desperate for the Next Big Thing, and they're prepared to spend even less money on even more books than ever before. So, while slushpile manuscripts are getting worse, less money and time is being put into polishing the rough gems. These days it's write well, and sell well, or get the hell out.
(You might wonder, if literacy levels are dropping, why you can't write for people who are just as illiterate as you. Simple answer: illiterate people don't buy books. The people who do buy books love words enough to recognize lots of them.)
If you're one of these writers, with great ideas and a passion for writing but lacking confidence in spelling and grammar, you're just fscked. Give up. You're wasting your time writing when you should be reading -- Modern English Usage, preferably, but at least read the spelling suggestions and grammar warnings in your word processor.
To help you figure out if you're in this category, here are some different types of spelling errors, ranked in increasing order of ineptitude:
- Typos. Everyone makes the occasional tpyo. See? Especially in web forums and blog comments. Only the most pedantic grammar nazis get a bug in the butt over a few typos (and pedantic grammar nazis only buy new editions of OED anyway, so who gives a fsck what they think). They're easily fixed (the typos, not the nazis). But it's a problem if you make:
- Consistent Typos. These are actually:
- Words You Don't Know How To Spell Correctly. This category includes Words You Spell Phonetically. This is where it gets bad, because it demonstrates that you haven't read widely enough to see these words spelled correctly. You may be forgiven a (very) few of these, as the intended meaning will probably be understood. But agents will reach for the form letter when they find:
- Words You Don't Know How To Use Properly. This includes tortured phrases like intensive purposes and classic mistakes like its/it's and their/there/they're. They're very simple rules, kids, and it's a shame you keep breaking them.
This last category is the (slush)killer, the "auto-no", the point at which your manuscript may simply become unreadable. They're especially dangerous because spellcheck software won't pick them up; indeed you may only discover them when a patient and better-educated friend looks up from your manuscript and says "What the fsck does this mean?"
Really, if you're going to write in English, you're expected to understand it. Category four blunders are like interrupting a serious conversation to tell a bad joke: people might ignore one and pause politely for two, but three or more and someone's going to throw something at you. You should be glad at this point that your manuscript didn't get published -- a hardcover hurts more.
