Mildly Annoying Single Point Corrections. · 6:16pm Mar 1st, 2012
It's one of those things that I know people are trying to help and be nice and all... But WHY must people use the comment system to point out an individual mistake?
Seriously, I know you guys are out there. Why do you post a comment and then mention a single missing capital out of an entire story? There are likely more than that one and I know you'll find them, but people mention just ONE.
Honestly, this kind of thing reminds me of a military addage:
"Two men are a target, one man is a waste of ammo."
Like I said, I KNOW you're trying to be helpful... But think of my point of view. I get a message saying 'you missed a period in X', and I spend the next five minutes going to the chapter, hunting for the line, just to make one, correction. Then later, I get another message pointing out another single mistake. So I spend the five minutes getting all the way back into the story to find THAT one. Add about fifteen more and suddenly I lost about an hour of my time just getting to where I CAN correct things. It's NOT cost effective.
So please, if you want to point out mistakes, try to make it at least worth the time it takes to find them. And don't make me scroll through a list of comments to mark them all. I don't feel like spending my day trying to 'mow the lawn' by cutting individual blades of grass with a pair of scissors. You'd be irritated too.
I get the same kind of comment sometimes. It's annoying.
The worst comments are "are you aware that your fiction contains several grammatical errors?"
- You don't say?
If I comment on an error of some kind, I try to pull the whole sentence with it, so it's easily referenced and can just be plopped into a "Find" bar. Not to mention I find it's easier to point out the error when it's right next to my comment rather than "It's up there...somewhere."
Well, you might just ignore them. They are just letting you know, not demanding a correction and if you think correcting the mistakes it's not worth your time, don't do it. Nothing wrong about that, it's just fanfiction after all.
When it comes to something like that, I ignore it unless multiple people are complaining about the same error.
Of course, you don't have to worry about that from me. Not only do I normally autocorrect as I read any errors, it has to be a very bone-jarring error to pull me out of the story.
I can see it would be annoying... But what do you expect people to do?
Not mention if they see an error? That's not helpful.
Wait until they see another? Okay for proofreaders, but what if someone just notices one error?
IMHO, what's needed here is a technical solution. For example, if readers had the ability to tag sections of text.
Someone could highlight a typo, write a little comment, and submit it.
Authors could then just go through an correct all the reported errors in one go, easily.