www.inkthinkerblog.com — This morning I was leafing through a prominent magazine for writers when I found an article that seemed immediately applicable. I started reading it, thinking to myself, “This is great!” And then I found it: the glaring error that ruined the rest of the article for me.
The typo? The writer shared an example of getting “antidotes” from a local teacher for an article for children. As in “Alas! I’ve been poisoned!” “Never fear, I have the antidote!” Yeah. What she really meant was “anecdotes.” For those who aren’t familiar with the difference,
An anecdote is a short tale narrating an interesting or amusing biographical incident. … An anecdote is always based on real life, an incident involving actual persons, whether famous or not, in real places. … Sometimes humorous, anecdotes are not jokes, because their primary purpose is not simply to evoke laughter, but to reveal a truth more general than the brief tale itself, or to delineate a character trait or the workings of an institution in such a light that it strikes in a flash of insight to their very essence. (source)
I don’t know, maybe I’m being harder on the publication because it’s a writers’ magazine, or maybe because I feel like the writer should know better (which she should!), but I just couldn’t enjoy it after that. How could someone who doesn’t know the difference between anecdote and antidote possible speak authoritatively in a how-to article for writers?
Admittedly, this error could have been cause by a well-meaning but misinformed copyeditor. But if the writer had a chance to look at the galleys before publication, she should have caught it. And if she submitted the article with the error in place, copyediting should have caught it. So whose fault is it?
Frankly, I don’t care. I’m just mad that it ruined the article.
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And here I was thinking I was the only one that let stuff like that bother me……must be the recovering lawyer in both of us!
Dave Rakowski
Allentown, PA
Ouch!
That writer needs the antidote to tell about anecdotes.
You are not being too hard on the magazine and/or the writer! Not only would that error ruin the article, it would ruin the magazine for me, and a lot would be required to achieve redemption. Seriously, did we not learn about the difference between those two words in middle school? Now I think I sound harsh, but really, no one who even hopes to be a passable writer, editor or copyeditor should have let that mistake pass undetected.