One of the first rules students are taught in reporting classes at a journalism school is spelling people’s name’s correctly in news stories, feature stories, and editorials. Misspelling a person’s name is not only a rude discount, it undermines your credibility, the thought being that if you can’t even get the name right, how can readers trust you to get anything else right?
Used to be a copyeditor would catch a lot of the misspelt names. Now, reporters and writers are expected to catch their own mistakes because copyediting has become a lost art as organizations cut costs. When a reporter covers a story, readers expect him/her to have a basic knowledge of the subject and when that proves not to be true, the story won’t be trusted.
Novelists face the same issues. If you misspell the names of famous people and widely known cities, you’re in trouble. The more obvious the error–to general readers–the more likely it is to be caught. Obscure errors will bring specialists out of the woodwork in editorial reviews even though most Amazon reader reviewers don’t have the background to catch them.
One of my favorite historical novelists got some simple facts wrong in a recent book that brought the wrath of the gods down on his back. I hope he went back and corrected the material for the next edition. If you’re writing a civil war novel and say that the South fired on “Fort Summer” in “Savannah Harbor,” you–and your beta readers or editor–have been somewhat lax.
Personally, I think it’s especially damaging to make an amateurish mistake on the first page of a novel. Here’s what I saw in the opening paragraph of a book by a well-known writer for a major publisher (that should have had editors and fact checkers):
“Eighty-one-year-old Ernie Keene, retired corporal, United States Navy, stood on the misty flight deck of the USS Intrepid and looked out at New Jersey.”
I immediately lost my faith in the accuracy of the book because the rank of corporal is not a navy rank. I wonder: how can an author of a black ops book not know this? How can the publisher’s editorial staff not know this? Presumably, most readers of black ops and other military-style novels would also know this.
This error alone probably won’t sink the book, but it creates a barrier between the readers and the author about the author’s credentials for writing the novel. As with a news story, readers will think, “If you make a mistake like this, you’re probably making bigger mistakes that are harder for a layperson to catch.”
Authors have a luxury older generations didn’t have. Type in the word “corporal” in a search engine, and you know the navy doesn’t have them. Type in a name that can have multiple spellings, and find out which way the famous person you’re writing about spelt it. And then there’s Wikipedia for basic information about a lot of things.
We have to sweat the “small stuff” or our readers will think we didn’t research the big stuff.
Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of the Florida Folk Magic Series, the latest of which is “Fate’s Arrows.”
The latest incarnation of the “Weakest Link” is is currenlty airing on NBC. I’m surprised by the questions people miss. Some of the answers should be known by people in elementary or middle school. Okay, let’s stipulate that in a quiz show studio, things are a bit chaotic. But still, why don’t people know this stuff?
The group fought against desegregation, communists, and homosexuals. Above is a group photograph of the wheelers and dealers taken turning a 1956 special session of the state senate. (Florida Memory Photo). You can read an article on Florida Memory about the gang 
The St. Joe Paper Company in the 1950s when my novels are set, had a massive influence in the panhandle: paper mill, landholdings, a railroad called the Apalachicola Northern that carried wood products from the coastal mill to Quincy, Florida for transfer to mainline railroads. The paper company, part of a trust established by the du Pont family, still exists but focuses on commercial and residential real estate. The railroad, named the Apalachicola Northern, was referred to as the Port St. Joe Route. (It still exists as part of a conglomerate.)
Thanks to all of you who stopped by Amazon to pick up an on-sale copy of “Fate’s Spells.” I hope you like it.
Sometimes people who have been drunk wake up and can’t believe they did the things sober people claim they did while they were drunk. Since they don’t remember it, they can claim in the middle of their hangovers that they’re not responsible for whatever happened. Do you suppose we might do this even when we’re not drunk?
I suspect so. Being drunk is a crutch, I think, as is going through life acting like we’re drunk even when we’re sober. I wonder: are we afraid to make commitments, to take this job rather than that job, adopt viewpoint ABC rather than viewpoint XZY? As long as we don’t commit, we probably feel free to make another choice later. Some people like keeping their options open, often until “outside forces” start eliminating those options.