Thursday, April 17, 2008

Satisfying Moments in Copy Editing

Catching the error in this sentence from a Q-and-A article about a cancer survivor:
"While in the throws of your illness, did you ever feel like giving up?"

(I know the typo will be immediately visible to some. But when you're reading for content, clarity, voice, style, punctuation, confirming that all speakers have proper first attributions, that all assertions and implications are sufficiently backed up with fact, etc., it's easy to miss something like this. Hence the fact that the editor who read it before me didn't catch it. Scroll down to see correction.)

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The writer meant "throes."

1 comment:

Joel said...

Perhaps, instead of an apparent misspelling, it's an oblique reference to the consummation of nausea. Indeed, notice how the question ends.

Sorry. Lots of folks will recognize a bad pun and suppress it; some of us reflexively project it.

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