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This Opinionator blog post from the NY Times may come in handy for those students working on dissertations this summer :-) Some of you may have read this already-pls excuse any duplication --Best, kw from the New York Times: "The Price of Typos" by Virginia Heffernan Opinionator blog July 17, 2011 Excerpts: ..."Bad spellers are a breed apart from good ones. A writer with a mind that doesn't register how words are spelled tends to see through the words he encounters--straight to the things, characters, ideas, images and emotions they conjure. A good speller, by contrast--the kind who never fails to clock the idiosyncratic orthography of "algorithm" or "Albert Pujols" --tends to see language as a system. Good spellers are often drawn to poetry and wordplay, while bad spellers, for whom language is a conduit and not an end in itself, can excel at representation and reportage." Excerpts: ...Editors I spoke to confirmed my guesses. Before digital technology unsettled both the economics and the routines of book publishing, they explained, most publishers employed battalions of full-time copy editors and proofreaders to filter out an author's mistakes. Now, they are gone." "There is also "pressure to publish more books more quickly than ever," an editor at a major publishing house explained. Many publishers now skip steps. "In the past, you really readied the book in several discrete stages," Paul Elie, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, explained. "Manuscript, galley proofs, revised proofs, blue lines. You marked your changes at each stage, and then the compositor incorporated them and sent you the next intermediate stages of proof--the text is fluid, in motion, and this leads to typos." "Authors, too, bear some blame for the typo explosion...Use of the word processor has resulted in a substantial decline in author discipline and attention. Manuscripts are much longer than they were 25 years ago, much more casually assembled, and beyond spell check (and not even then; and of course it will miss typos if the word is a word) it is amazing how little review seems to have occurred before the text is sent to the editor. Seriously, you have no idea how sloppy some of these things are." ... Excerpts: ..."Rushing to publish and overlooking glaring typos may have become part of the new economics of traditional publishing. But on the Web, typos sometimes come with a price. "Spelling mistakes 'cost millions' in lost online sales," said a BBC headline last week. The article cited an analysis of British Web figures that suggested that a single spelling mistake on an e-commerce site can hurt credibility so much that online revenues fall by half."... from the Opinionator blog-Virginia Heffernan, NY Times excerpts July 17, 2011 "The Price of Typos" ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Karen Weaver, MLS Electronic Resources Statistician Collection Management Duquesne University, Gumberg Library Pittsburgh PA email: [log in to unmask] Gmail: [log in to unmask] Twitter: @ka_weaver Member, ALA COSWL Committee on the Status of Women in Librarianship Follow us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/ALA-Committee-on-the-Status-of-Women-in-Librarianship-COSWL/164770476903286 or Tweetup with us on women's issues at: @ALA_COSWL