RARA-AVIS: Caught Stealing

From: T. Kent Morgan ( tkmorgan@shaw.ca)
Date: 30 Dec 2006


Joy wrote in reply to my post about the mistakes on page 7 of Huston's Caught Stealing turning me off.

"No, Kent, you aren't the only one. It happens to me all the time. When I trip over dumb mistakes in newspapers, I often send off a letter to the editor, but in books, it's too much trouble to figure out where to complain. My excuse is that I copyedit for a living."

Joy, I also edited as a major part of my job in educational communications and know how mistakes can still be made. Taking the oopposite position, I co-wrote a twice weekly sports column in a daily paper for four years and always dreaded my first look at the "finished" product, i.e., what those editors did to it and got wrong. In the case of Caught Stealing, my biggest problem was the author writing the baseball passage about caught stealing, the book's title, and not knowing what the term meant. At least I don't think he would have written it the way he did if he did know.

Kent Morgan



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