A. James Editing

The Huffington Post has published a very informative article about gluten and its disruptive effects on the body. Little does Dr. Hyman know, typos have a disruptive effect too…at least they do to me.

Simply eliminating this insidious substnace from your diet, may help you achieve lifelong vibrant health.

I love that alliterative phrase, “insidious substance”. The misspelling of substance I could do without though.

To learn more about my body, I recently underwent an elimination diet wherein gluten was eliminated for about three weeks. On the day that I reintroduced it, I found that I had to pee urgently and often. I suppose that means I have a mild-severe reaction to gluten. Has anyone else had a similar experience?

Well, it’s official: it’s tomorrow. That means the first installment of my typos in books posts begin today! Yay hooray! I will call them Published Blunders.

The author: John Steinbeck
The book: East of Eden
The publisher: Penguin Books
All of that information in one place true to MLA form: Steinbeck, John.East of Eden. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.

The blunder: One of the characters is named Liza. On page 141 of this Steinbeck Centennial Edition, she is referred to as Lisa…twice…while the correct spelling appears three times on the same page. Oh, Penguin. Here are the sentences:

“No, sir, Mr. Trask, Lisa’s used to cooking for nine starving children.”

And…

“It’s a word of anger and sorrow to Lisa.”

East of Eden is one of my new favorites and I highly recommend it to anyone, not just classic literature buffs. For book details and reviews click here. But if you’re going to buy it, I would shamelessly recommend doing so from this store.

The ever-confusing conundrum of the order of closing quotation marks and punctuation. There are certain circumstances in which the closing quotation mark comes before a piece of punctuation and others when it comes after. Usually when a direct quote is involved the piece of punctuation goes inside the quotation mark like this:

Together they would form, in the words of their press release: “The world’s first fully-integrated media and communications company for the internet century.”

In The BBC’s article, “Why AOL Time Warner failed to change the world,” the previous quote appeared. In the same article, however, this quote also appeared:

“Shockwaves from the merger are already being felt around the business world”.

In the first example, the punctuation went inside the quotation mark and in the second, a sentence of similar construction, the punctuation went outside the quotation mark…hmm.

Unfortunately for The BBC, not only is this second sentence grammatically incorrect, it is not consistent with the manner in which quotes are managed elsewhere in the article. I praise you, BBC, for your excellent reporting and I look forward to the day of grammatical perfection in online news copy.

Off the front page of BBC News, in the article entitled “Apec leaders drop climate target,” this freelance copywriter found a typo.

What The BBc wrote:

But leaders have failed to agree a target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (Apec) forum.

What A. James Editing (also known as me) would have written:

But leaders have failed to agree on a target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (Apec) forum.

While the aim of my site is to catch linguistic hiccups wherever I find them and not make comments regarding the politics of the day, I would still recommend that you read this article. It’s short, I promise.

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