” have a slightly greater affect.”… in para beginning with “Further.”

In this case, it should be “effect.” “Affect” can be a noun in psychology (mood, aspect).

Sometimes I wish newspapers and magazines would publish both the unedited and edited versions so readers could see that we aren’t just running a spell check. The bad part about this profession is that no reader will ever high-five me for catching all those typos, dangling modifiers, lapses in clarity or logic, plagiarized passages, and inaccurate information, because if I’m doing my job right, they’ll never know that stuff ever existed.

Having followed the link to that study, I don’t agree that is what the study suggests. It does not appear to me to be an analysis of the number and nature of newspaper errors; rather, it is a study of the number and nature of corrections published by newspapers.

It strikes me as a leap of faith to propose that newspapers acknowledge errors in roughly the same proportions that they occur. Would a newspaper not be more motivated to acknowledge a misidentification or an error in reporting than the appearance of “free reign” in a story?

Are some newspapers more likely to acknowledge errors than others? If so, are we to conclude that they are more error-prone, or more forthcoming and transparent about their mistakes? Or, perhaps, more responsive to feedback from those outside the newsroom?

Further, the study’s authors acknowledge that they analyzed only those corrections compiled by Craig Silverman on his blog, Regret the Error, in the year 2005. We therefore have no historical context for these findings. What would the proportions be in other years?

I also wonder if you’re being unduly narrow in your definition of a copyeditor’s responsibility. Are not numbers, location, and even some elements of identification (referring to the mayor as a common councilman) within the copy desk’s purview?

I copyedit book-length manuscripts, not newspaper copy, but I have occasionally caught instances of plagiarism and other errors you characterize as subjective. I would be surprised if it were not the same on a newspaper copy desk.

Missing from this description is any discussion of two key points: how many errors didn’t make it into print because they were caught and fixed by copyeditors, and how many additional errors are caught when you add copyeditors (either to reduce the workload on one poor overworked drudge or to provide a second set of eyes).

With the caveat that I haven’t seen the actual Mensing/Oliver study, and am relying here on (at best) second-hand reports, their study is badly flawed without that missing information and the conclusion is potentially meaningless.

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Geoff Hart (www.geoff-hart.com)
ghart@videotron.ca / geoffhart@mac.com
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Effective Onscreen Editing:
http://www.geoff-hart.com/books/eoe/onscreen-book.htm
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