I’m terribly annoyed with a co-publisher in China that I work with. I received an email yesterday telling me that they are planning to do a reprint of the books and asked me if there were any mistakes I wanted to point out so that they could correct it.
So I very nicely called the editor up and pointed out some stuff like how ALL the hyphens in the textbooks are now actually en-dashes and how there is too big a space before and after the apostrophe in a word. The blank lines in which students are supposed to write the answers are also too short. But she then says she wants to know “REAL ERRORS”. By that she meant mistakes pertaining only to grammar and spelling.
But to me, those en-dashes masquerading as hyphens ARE “real errors”, or so she likes to call them. En-dashes are dashes that are a little longer than hyphens and are used mainly between numbers to mean the word ‘to’. An em-dash is longer than an en-dash and is usually used mid-sentence when you want to elaborate on something. Anyway, the subsitution of one for the other is just NOT acceptable as they mean different things. I’m not going to go into details here as it would bore the hell out of everyone. [Monoceros and Barney: If you’re reading this, I’m sure you know this all too well!]
And for some Friday trivia, the en-dash and em-dash are so-called because they supposedly stretch the length of the letter ‘n’ and ‘m’ respectively.
So yes, those punctuation mistakes irk the hell out of me to say the least! It’s just terribly grating on my eyes. That Chinese editor tells me that it’s because the software that their printer/designer/typesetter or whoever is using, can’t format the text properly. WHATEVER. I don’t know who’s the culprit! If I did, I would wring the person alive. I’m like hello????? Can you please get someone to do something about it then???? Telling me that they can’t do anything about something as simple as this is just a lame excuse and totally unacceptable for a reputable publisher.
Anyways, I can’t do anything about it if they don’t want to heed my advice. I can’t be there to force the typesetter to do my bidding. I would if I could. Oh well, they can continue with their low standards but I’m definitely not compromising on mine!