22AprProofreading error costs $20,000.

Many of you will have seen that the publishers Penguin had a small problem with a cook-book misprint this week (for full details see http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/hot-water-over-spelt-check-20100416-skrh.html) which led to the recall of the book at a cost of $20,000.  For ONE WORD!!  Admittedly one that could get some people very hot under the collar: the recipe called for “freshly ground black people” instead of “freshly ground black pepper”.

An easy thing to overlook, when the phrase is in most recipes in exactly the same place and the proofreader has checked dozens of recipes already that day.  You begin to see what you expect to see…  But I bet Penguin are proofreading everything twice now.  And the proofreader in question will probably not be used again.  I wonder how many of the cook-book’s users would have noticed the mistake – or really minded; I certainly doubt any of them would have thought it was intentional.

But it just goes to show how easy it is to make mistakes when you’re proofing a long or repetitive document.  It’s even easier when you’ve written it yourself, because you “know” what you wrote.  Very often you’ve re-written it to the point where you can practically quote it verbatim, and you simply don’t see the mistakes.

At least Penguin used a proofreader.  A lot of stuff published these days, especially on the web, appears to have used a spellchecker, if that: there are typos everywhere - commas, apostrophes and full stops in the wrong places - wrong versions of to/too/two and suchlike homonyms - and whole sentences where all the words could be spelt right but you can’t tell because the sentence itself doesn’t make sense.  And that’s supposed to be a good advertisement for a business….

If companies want readers to take them seriously they should do the job properly and get someone with a passing acquaintance with the English language to check what’s been written.  It may cost a couple of hours of someone’s time but it could make the difference between a prospect taking the business seriously or walking away. 

It could even save them $20,000. 

I think that’s worth two hours’ pay, myself; how about you?