Just want to get something off my chest.<\/p>\n
I have just received a hard copy of my forthcoming book The Great Philosophers<\/span>. I always receive these new books with trepidation, because I know I’ll quickly stumble on something that’ s slipped through the editorial net.<\/p>\n The problem with writing philosophy books for trade publishers is the copy-editing.<\/p>\n Philosophy text is extremely<\/span> easy to screw up. Miss out a quotation mark, change “a” to “the” etc. and you turn very carefully written philosophical prose into gibberish.<\/p>\n Copy editors make literally hundreds<\/span> of such little changes (I guess more than 500 in this one). And they don’t flag them up.<\/p>\n In both the DK book and, to a lesser extent, this one, the copy editor, by trying to “improve” my writing, has turned it into embarrassing crap. Most of the crap I spot in the short time I am given to proof read the text (in this case, a week, while on family holiday in foreign country).<\/p>\n Inevitably some of the crap slips through.<\/p>\n In this book, for example, the section on Wittgenstein talks about ‘the way in which “pain” functions’. i.e. the way the word<\/span> ‘pain’ functions. Talking about a word requires putting it in quotation marks. The copy editor obviously thought there were too many quotations marks, so just randomly took out half of them. Including from headings.<\/p>\n So here’s my new year’s resolution – from now on I am going to insist that copy editors flag every single last bloody change they make<\/span>. Even cutting a quotation mark. I recommend anyone writing similar books do the same.<\/p>\n (Having said that, I’m otherwise quite pleased with the book)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Just want to get something off my chest. I have just received a hard copy of my forthcoming book The Great Philosophers. I always receive these new books with trepidation, because I know I’ll quickly stumble on something that’ s slipped through the editorial net. The problem with writing philosophy books for trade publishers is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}