Getting distracted

My colleagues in the editorial biz call it an "occupational hazard," this inability we all seem to have in getting through an article, email, blog entry, book chapter--or heck, sometimes even a newspaper headline--without stopping to examine an error. It could be a misspelled word, an error in syntax, an errant comma or misplaced hyphen, or something incredibly minor, like an extra space between words (which, honestly, drives me nuts). Whatever the error, it stops us in our tracks, completely stymied that some crackerjack editor didn't notice and fix the problem before it went to print (or whatever one calls the online-only equivalent of print).

I get distracted every time I read something in TIME magazine, one of my favorites for catching up on in-depth news stories, tales of global strife, and little bits of humorous fluff that the editors find interesting enough to include. I've noticed the magazine's rather new convention for capitalizing the first word after a colon, as though the colon somehow ended the first phrase completely, warranting a brand new sentence. This boggles my mind, not only for its sheer stupidity but also for flagrantly ignoring basic English sentence structure. It's as if every copy editor at the magazine has suddenly come down with a case of creative editingitis (ED-it-ing-EYE-tus)--the disease that strips the editor of years of education, replacing it with a desire to recreate English from scratch. I equate creative editingitis with Ebonics, that ill-fated attempt in the '80s to make a new hybrid language out of American southernisms and completely broken English.

So what is it about these errors that keeps me from enjoying a good read? Probably the knowledge that such errors would have been caught had I been the copy editor in charge. Yes, it sounds cocky. But that doesn't make it any less true.