Merrill Perlman on “Why ‘Amercia’ needs copy editors.”

Many years ago, I was a copy editor at a daily newspaper. Since leaving that post in 1988, I’ve remained a copy editor — but in my mind only, and without getting paid. It’s impossible to ignore how badly writing standards and proofreading practice have slipped, in all areas and in all forms. It’s not that people have gotten dumber — as Perlman notes, it’s that the Internet has sped up the transmission of information, and that print publications have laid off the copy editors (and many digital outlets never hired them in the first place). Over the years on this blog, I posted some of the most glaring errors I found, errors of typing and errors of fact, because I was astonished that they’d actually gotten published in places such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. But at some point, I just stopped. There were so many of them that it no longer seemed remarkable. If you see one cow while you’re driving through Pennsylvania, it’s notable. But when every hillock is festooned with them, everybody stops talking about it. That’s what’s happening with errors.

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