Black Static

Following on from my last post, and in a spirit of helping the spelling challenged of the literary world, I thought for today's sermon I would list some of the most common typos that crop up. This list isn't meant to be comprehensive, but if it can pull one sinner back onto the straight and narrow then I shall consider it work well done.

Its/It's

This is undoubtedly the winner in any competition to find the most common typo, and understandably so. We can talk about Pete's bear and TTA's magazines and the horse's carriage, and so it seems obvious and entirely logical that we can also say things like it's brains fell out. Sadly this is one of those occasions where logic is about as much good as a politician in an economic meltdown. It is not a noun (like Pete, TTA and horse), but a pronoun (like he or whom), and those don't get apostrophised when in the possessive form: instead they become his, whose and its. It's is only ever used when it's a contraction of it is, otherwise it's its (see what I did there?).

Lightning/Lightening

Okay, that stuff Zeus throws about when the missus is giving him a hard time about ogling young women on the Mount Olympus version of Big Brother is called lightning. Lightening is what happens when you lose weight or your load is reduced or the sky gets brighter, but it's nowt to do with electrical discharges in the atmosphere. (That last is not entirely true. There is a usage of lightening where it means 'to give off flashes of lightning', but my advice is to think long and hard about whether to use it in that way.) Back when I was part of the Interzone editorial team I wanted to reject out of hand stories in which lightening was used for lightning but the others wouldn't let me. Not all editors are tolerant, pinko liberals when it comes to spelling though. You've been warned.

Complement/Compliment

If the horse tells the carriage that it looks nice tonight, then the horse is said to be complimenting the carriage (and yes, I do know horses don't speak). On the other hand, if you're at all familiar with the old song lyric in which love and marriage go together like 'a horse and carriage', then in that scenario they are complementing each other. There is another usage of complement in which it means the number necessary to be complete, as in 'the carriage had a full complement of horses'.

Reign/Rein

I see this all the time in usages such as 'he was given free reign' and 'she reigned him in'. Yeah, I can understand the confusion given that our plutocracy has a reigning monarch as its figurehead, but the correct usage is rein/reined, as in the sense of reins that the carriage driver uses to control his horses. I am working the horse and carriage metaphor into the ground.

Names

Not a typo as such, but I'm continually amazed by the number of stories I see in which the author appears to forget the names of his or her characters, offering variant spellings or completely different names. It happens in about 10-20% of the stories I proofread for Interzone. It happened in four of the sixteen books I reviewed for the last Black Static, including one title where Esteban became Gustavo for the whole middle section of the book. It happened in the worst proofread book I can ever recall seeing, with one tense scene in which the police discuss the serial killer they are hunting completely undermined by the author's use of the killer and his girlfriend's names for the investigating officers.

In my opinion, no other error is more likely to jeopardise a reader's suspension of disbelief and trust in a writer's ability to tell a compelling story. If you can't even remember what your characters are called, the people you invented and have lived with through the writing of a book or story, then why should you expect anyone else to care?

Okay, we're done for now. I may pontificate some more on this subject at a future date if I can't think of anything interesting to talk about.