I just got around to reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, more than a year after it was published, and I was as engaged and enlightened as I'd hoped to be. Pollan examines "our national eating disorder" by following the paths four very different meals take from source to table: corn-based industrial, industrial organic (read: Whole Foods), sustainable organic, and foraged. Pollan makes statistics go down as easily as a Big Gulp, and his willingness (his eagerness!) to immerse himself in the narrative--at different points in his quest he buys a farmlot steer, slaughters chickens, learns to shoot a rifle, and nearly kills himself hunting abalone--is impressive. His prose is graceful, thoughtful, and often very funny.
So here's my question: Where in this book's production were the copy editor and the proofreader?
This is a serious book, a destined-to-be-a-best-seller book, a book by an established writer with an outstanding reputation. It was published by Penguin Press, hardly a lightweight in the publishing industry.
And yet I stumbled through a thicket of inexcusable errors in the text, including:
- "Lay" for "lie" and "laying" for "lying" (page 124: "I couldn't just lay there"; page 192: "Eighty or so cattle were milling or laying around"). Elsewhere he uses the verbs correctly, so I doubt that the errors were made for stylistic effect. (And please don't tell me I'm a horrible, horrible prescriptivist for insisting that lay and lie shouldn't be confused. I know that people mix them up in speech, and I have no problem with reproducing that speech in print, between quotation marks. But I expect a stricter standard when the prose is the author's own and the author is a journalist--indeed, a professor of journalism.)
- "Forego" for "forgo" (page 311: "...we could choose to forego meat for moral reasons..."). I touched on forego/forgo in a previous post.
- "Spec" for "speck" (page 319: "...farms like this are but a spec on the monolith of modern animal agriculture..."). "Spec" is short for "speculative" or "specification." A "speck" is a tiny particle.
- "Forbear" for "forebear" (page 339: "...their domestic forbears..."). See forego/forgo.
- "Prosciutto" spelled with transposed vowels ("proscuitto") in at least two references (page 345 and page 353). It's spelled correctly at least once.
- "Site" for "sight" (page 351, in a passage about hunting with a rifle: "I took aim ... aligning the site's U and I with the top of the animal's front leg...").
- "Blanche" (a woman's name) for "blanch" (a cooking technique) and "kneed" (assaulted with a knee, past tense) for "knead" (manipulate bread dough, present tense), both on page 402.
- "Having" for "have" (page 300: "...there are still cultures that having been eating more or less the same way for generations...").
(All page numbers correspond to the hardcover edition. A paperback edition will be released next week, also by Penguin; I'll be interested to see whether the errors are corrected.)
Every writer, even a writer of Pollan's skill and stature, is guilty of occasional oversights and errors. Editors and proofreaders exist to protect writers from those mistakes and to enforce a consistent style. In the past, when a writer signed a book contract he or she could expect to work closely with a copy editor (when the book was in manuscript form) and a proofreader (when the text was in galleys).
Nowadays, though, for reasons having to do mostly with time and money, close editing is a luxury even top writers like Michael Pollan apparently aren't entitled to.
Suppose you yourself are a writer hoping to publish a book. What does this mean for you?
Well, it means that if you care about the quality of the finished product, you're pretty much on your own. You'd be well advised to hire your own copy editor and proofreader--two different people, by the way, because the skills are different and it's human nature to be blind to one's own errors. (And of course you already know that you'll have to hire your own publicist.)
I've had the good fortune to work with some superb copy editors over the years. I'd be happy to share their names if you think you could use (and afford) their services. And I hope to keep building my list of resources, so if you have recommendations you'd like to share, please send them to me.
P.S. Penguin Press evidently didn't hire an a copy editor [note: see this post's comments!] to review its own website. Here's a sentence I didn't finish reading (it has three errors--of spelling, syntax, and verb agreement--in the first fourteen words): "Dedicated to publishing literary nonfiction and select fiction, it's distinguished roster of authors include Jon Lee Anderson, John Berendt ..."
P.P.S. Read Gary Kamiya's eloquent tribute to editors, published last month in Salon.
P.P.P.S. I've only skimmed over the content of The Omnivore's Dilemma here. For a counterpoint to Pollan's perspective, read B.R. Myers's "Hard to Swallow" in the September issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Myers takes Pollan and other contemporary food writers to task for their "failure to think in moral terms."
