ToM grammatical errors

[Metal Sheets]

Hi all, this is my first post and it is something that has truly bothered me. Perhaps I have later editions of the earlier books but when I read Towers I shook my head in disgust. My girlfriend asks me every night how my book is and my usual answer is something along the lines of "Quite good honey." Not so this time, more like "The plot is choppy and seems to be forced together, but even worse are all the spelling and grammatical errors." In a related note, and it has been touched upon, when I began reading the posts on this site I was amazed at how many mistakes there were. This is a site that dedicates itself to an in depth analysis of a very convoluted story. The fact that you have read, and understood the books enough to make educated statements about the texts indicates that you have some working knowledge of how our language works. There is some excuse for grammatical errors, nobody's perfect and I've probably made a half dozen here, but when you spell a word incorrectly a little line appears and points out your screw up. Come on people, tighten up your typing, please. Sorry for that, I don't mean to rant at you, especially with this being my cherry popper, but it really irked the hell out of me. That being said I thank you all for being here, you're doing a great job and I look forward to making many posts that are more friendly in nature.

[Mr Ares]

There is some excuse for grammatical errors, nobody's perfect and I've probably made a half dozen here, but when you spell a word incorrectly a little line appears and points out your screw up.

I don't get that. I'm sure I'm not the only one who does without a spell checker.

[Tollieman]

Wasn't so bothered with the errors, so much as when 'Er' was used often for a chapter. That annoyed the hell out of me.

[threadnecromancer]

One thing which annoyed me was that as I recall the word 'slave' was used. I do not remember that world being used by any third agers in the entire series, the only characters who I remember saying it are the Chosen, instead the modern people say Da'Covale, Gai Shain for life or human animal. As I recall the Westland characters had a lot of difficulty even understanding the concept of slavery and the word slave was never used as the characters only used the specific cultural terms for it. Perhaps I am remembering the words frequency incorrectly but it struck me when I read it as a strange choice of words for the character.

[stoneface]

My favorite glitch is during the trolloc attack, when Galad moved "to the of the camp." The typos are annoying, but we read on and wait eagerly for the next book.

 

The Way of Kings (also Tor and first edition, of course) has similar issues with spelling and grammar. I understand how cutting and pasting errors can cause slips such as the sentence starting with "Dalinor He ..." toward the final plateau battle. Editor says replace "He" with the name Dalinor, try to highlight and slip, think that "He" is deleted and then type.

 

There are several successive levels of editing, and in recent years publishers have been taking shortcuts by skimping on or outright skipping some of those levels. It's not just Tor. Once bought, I doubt that most readers will return a book for defects. The comments here indicate that we (the fans) are largely willing to stomach the glitches and wait eagerly for the next book. We complain, but still buy the next book. So, the shortcut is successful. We put up with the typos, and so get the quality (or lack thereof) that we accept.