I don't think the difference is in the writers so much, as in the publishers. If you look at manuscripts by famous writers they're often full of typos. And if you look at old correspondence between writers and their publishers there are often discussions of continuity errors and the like.<p>These days lots of books are self published. And even the big publishers spend less money + time on this kind of thing.
And some of the most common writing advise you will find, especially around getting out of writer's block, is to just write stuff down without correcting errors. Just get the first draft on paper. Some authors even choose to use typewriters or a pen because those don't allow them to easily go back to fix typos<p>Then in the second and third pass the author is obviously more concerned about fixing continuity, story and flow than about hunting typos.
I think there’s well-founded criticism in here, but the opening chunk confuses bad copy-editing — ultimately in the hands of the publisher — with bad writing. Which, especially from someone who’s job requires a good understanding of how publishing works, is bad. Surely Brighton Grace has submitted a manuscript and gotten back copyedits? One badly edited book justifies labeling an entire generation?<p>Perhaps the most important clue is in the first paragraph: “one thing I can always rely on is being let down by a popular or acclaimed piece of contemporary art.”<p>It’s hard to be a contrarian unless you’re willing to go to some lengths to find something to be outraged about.
> <i>the opening chunk confuses bad copy-editing — ultimately in the hands of the publisher — with bad writing.</i><p>I disagree. The article is very clear about the distinction, especially during the segue into the more substantive issues with the writing. And it does put due blame for the typos on the editors, not just the author.
You've noticed the salient points.<p>I can always rely on being bored by an article claiming to be superior to common or popular art.<p>I'm sure there are legitimate criticisms to level against whichever book he was complaining about, but he failed to make any.<p>Typos are bad. Typos have always existed. Are there more now? Seems unlikely, but someone <i>could</i> do some actual work to find out.
"none of these typos, with the exception of the jammed-together dialogue, prohibit access to meaning"<p>I hear that excuse constantly on the web if I try to correct people. And maybe it doesn't "prohibit access", but it does force me to think about things that aren't the point of the message, in order to figure out the point of the message.<p>I've given up correcting people. I'm old enough now that it's time to just watch people's choices come back on them. The whole world will pay for it, and I've done what I can.<p>I can't even get people to stop using "weary" to mean "wary". That's a whole different meaning, and there are <i>so</i> many people that use it wrong.
> I've given up correcting people.<p>I have a working theory that the prevalence of typos has been increasing in recent years, and it's on purpose:<p>* Humans trying to distinguish themselves from bots might add intentional typos to convey this<p>* AI bots, armed with the above knowledge, will also use this trick to seem more human<p>Of course, many typos are genuine, but this is increasingly not the case imo.
My phone frequently changes if to of, and "fixes" a bunch of things to be incorrect grammatically.
I've definitely tried to sound less robotic and will leave a minor typo so it's more obvious I'm human. We'll see when the bots or their controllers get wise.
> I can't even get people to stop using "weary" to mean "wary"<p>Interesting, I don't recall seeing that one before. Do you think people are mentally just adding a 'y' to the word 'wear' (and still pronouncing it in their head like 'wary') -- or do you think they are thinking of it as the real word 'weary' (having the long 'e' sound like the word 'weep')?
i don't know how much of it has been thrown out/superceded, but Thinking Fast and Slow would suggest it actually makes you slow down to think about the material, rather than jumping past.<p>"Force you to think" as long as the meaning isnt changed, isnt a bad thing
It is when the forcing results from negligence rather than deliberation. In those cases, you're not being confronted with an alien, difficult, or profound concept? You're being given a broken version of a boringly ordinary concept, and wasting your brainpower on papering over an orthographic or grammatical crack that should have been cleaned up by the author, or the editor, or one of the test readers.<p>In these cases, you're <i>not</i> thinking about the material; you're thinking about carelessly it's been put together, and how little regard the author appears to have for the audience.
The piece makes the point that a novel is about immersion in the text. Slowing down to think about the material is the opposite of the goal
Not sure about that. I mean, you misspelled “superseded” and this prompted me to take some time to write this reply. Maybe I will remember your point better for so doing, but is it really the best way to reflect on the topic?
Corectign can be pedanitic. If peopel can udnerstnad what you meant despite typeos, then successfull comjicaito nws achived. LLMs demsontrate this as they cna pasrse texst with heavy typos.<p>(typos deliebrate to prove point)
You slowed me down; the communication was successful, but suboptimal. You also kicked me down to the level of a small child struggling to assemble letters into words, distracting me from the meaning of your words.
What is “comjicaito”?
It concerns me though when a programmer “could care less” about the difference between an expression and its negation.
Don't even get me started on e.g. vs. i.e.
Eh, "modern people problems", kinda like first world problems.<p>Language has always been a localization of mispronounced and misspelled words. Just think about every word for an item but is just very slightly different across languages. The more modern age (lets say somewhere between the printing press and now) is exceptional as different languages and dialects have absolutely collapsed. Local dialects became regional and mixed. In smaller countries regional dialects became national. In big countries like the US meme words spread quickly across the nation because of things like radio, TV, and now internet.<p>You were living an a massively privileged position in time and you didn't realize it.
Look, i make typos all the time, from juxtaposing letters to omitting words, but I don't assign cultural significance to them.
>but I don't assign cultural significance to them.<p>That's just what it feels like not to be important.<p>In older books that persisted over long periods of time and popularity we've seen misspellings of the same word on the same page. These things got copied selectively over time and caused splits in language.<p>In the modern age quite often these misspellings can evolve into new words and/or memes. It's how language evolves.<p>At the end of the day it's very difficult to do anything about this at scale without reversing a bunch of technology. Simply put the average person isn't this careful in day to day writing. Yet we ask the average person to create more writing per person than any other time in history. By anecdotal observation I believe that most of these people don't want to shit out zillions of lines of text at all and only feel forced to do this by modern demands. Hence, this is why LLMs quickly took over shitting out zillions of lines of text. The people that were doing it by keyboard before were glad to give it up. The number of people that want to be precise about it is simply very low the same as the rest of history.
So we shouldn’t worry about regressing? This is also true of science, hygiene, human rights, and about a dozen other things we would be alarmed to lose, even if they were only around for people living in a “massively privileged position in time”
>So we shouldn’t worry about regressing?<p>The question is what can you do about it without becoming an insane authoritarian in the process and probably making things worse?<p>Progression or regression is not a "you" or an "I" thing, it's a "we" thing. Constant progression isn't much different from constant acceleration, you can't keep producing more energy forever, you eventually hit limits. In societies these limits much more quickly than the limits of the universe. Even maintaining status quo requires energy, so who are you going to get to spend that energy? And at the same time as all of this you still have all the base desires of the human animal. Greed and lust and selfishness isn't going away. The newer generations that didn't experience the terrible times isn't born with the defenses against terrible times like the old generations do, and over time the systems that are needed to protect against bad things fall apart because not enough people understand the costs behind them.<p>This cycle is as old as humanity itself. I don't think human intelligence is going to get us out of the trap unless we're talking world population scale manipulation or editing of humans.
Languages evolve. Words are borrowed from other languages, their meanings change, and so do their spellings.<p>"Entrée" refers to the starter in French, whereas in the US, it refers to the main dish.<p>"A date" in the sense of a romantic encounter, originates from the English use of "date" in the sense of a calendar date. The word was then borrowed back into French, this time with its English meaning (and is pronounced the same way as in English).<p>"Connoisseur" is spelled "connaisseur" in modern French, while English kept the old spelling.<p>"Con" used to be a vulgar term for the vagina in French. Today, it is mainly used as an insult to describe someone as stupid.
I felt the writing here was more than a bit pompous, but even though I had to reach out for my dictionary for this one, I have to admit it was really clever:<p>> but The Trees’ faults are untold, and they are untold in the second sense of the word.<p>Untold:<p>1. too much or too many to be counted<p>2. (of a story or an event) not narrated
I started my undergraduate years intent on the study of English literature. I dreamed of libraries and professorships. Then I met a hoard of useless people like the author of this rage bait and quickly pivoted to computer engineering.
They're talking about written communication, not literature. Literature is written communication that endures, has meaning, is canonical. Writing, even if published on paper, prose or poetry, isn't literature automatically. It can become literature if it's of high quality and provokes thought, communicates important ideas, captures ephemera. Eventually.
It's LLM-allergies.<p>The best fully-human writers of the next generation will be those who are very conscientious at grammar class and master all the rules, because by breaking them, they'll be able to push their prose to the most remote and unlikely locales in the geodesics of LLM-next-token-prediction-probability space. Such places where the Machines deign not trudge.
I think I agree, it's not just literature only, it includes our day to day conversation as well especially when it's not your native language. I noticed for myself as well.
The straitjacketed "correctness" that's policemongered by dictionaries and spell-checkers, is a sandbrained illusion. Make more typos; nurture neologisms; disregard dignity. It's a ratp.
From the book author's bio: "PERCIVAL EVERETT is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC"
tldr; nobody pays for editors and more than automated proofreading anymore for any form of printed matter.
Used to be worthwile that unintentional ambiguities and errors can be cleared up or left in, when at least a second pair of eyes goes over a text. This should help the reader not take anything away from the authors intent.
Two thoughts:<p>1) There's a lot of "This could be a stretch, but do jokes like this not risk further cementing the falsehoods peddled by right-wing outlets (controlled by the actual elite) that the university-educated view everyone else as inhuman?" sort of hedging here.<p>It's healthy to admit that a book written by a professor named Percival that is shortlisted for the Booker prize that critics are afraid or too blinded by groupthink to criticize (the thesis of this article) might be a product by and for the "actual elite."<p>-----<p>2) I think a lot of this is just cheapness. The "slop" paragraph near the end gets very close to that. One thing I've realized as an adult is how hard older 20th century books were edited - sometimes to the point that if you knew the details you might think the editor was more the author that the person with their name on the front of the book.<p>It was like the publishers used the authors' output as raw material for the product that they were going to <i>sell.</i> And while that editor likely didn't have much to say about the world, they knew how to polish something someone else had done until is was a professional, marketable product, like a music producer does.<p>In the days of monopoly and of fear of being locked out of access to monopolies, there's really no reason to put any effort into your output. You don't have any competitors to say it's garbage; you can announce it's a masterwork before anybody gets to read it and be assured that it will be announced a masterwork when released by people who have to make a living from access.<p>Also, an editor who can actually create a masterwork is hard to find, and has to be trained over many years in a meritocratic system by other editors who can create masterworks. That is far rarer now, and that makes it very expensive or hard to find for any price. The qualifications for getting into almost any industry now, but especially industries that have no objective metrics for success like the arts or other elite tastemaking, are who your parents are, who you know, and if you can support yourself in NYC for years without being paid while attending fancy parties and widening your social circle. This is a filter that eliminates talent almost completely, not one that generates it. Bonus: they'll also do the job almost for free - in fact, their parents might invest in <i>your</i> personal project.
2brnt2bthtisth?
Arggg. Also the Then vs Than problem. And using Disclaimer when you mean Disclosure. And my damn phone switch out perfectly good words for a different work.
One does, in fact, turn up the squelch to get rid of static.
> The Trees makes some extremely questionable decisions that I see as “macro typos” — thematic and stylistic mistakes made in haste that alter the appearance and feel of the entire text — which deflate its satirical power and social utility.<p>Defining "The author made creative choices I didn't like" as a typo is an impressively bold move.
I wonder if these people have ever read Riddley Walker, A Clockwork Orange, Finnegans Wake, or even half of Scottish literature.
People who say "up" or "upped" instead of "rise" or "raise" or "rose". Straight to jail.
“Fondle took long pull on his beer.”<p>it's wrong , yes, but otoh it's funnier this way
My hottest take of the era: LLM voice is perfect grammar and spelling. What’s going to damage Literature?
I would like to posit that as grammar dies, we execute the apostrophe first. Somehow, despite the simple rule of “this is never EVER used to show plurality”, it is almost exclusively used for that these days.
> the same story (with an identically worded bulletin)<p>Well....<p><a href="https://youtu.be/ksb3KD6DfSI" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/ksb3KD6DfSI</a>
Man the irony of this piece. I think I'll have Gemini translate it into modern English because I was really interested in the subject. (ouvre?)
Again! Another website that annoys visitors
with slide-in widgets click-to-continue. So,
my perma-ban list of websites grows. Now I need
to find an extension to block websites that use
those slide-ins ...
and omg people that type without capitializing anything wtf i hate them