WolfEdge said:
On the flip side, I've never encountered a novel that was completely free of grammatical goofs or spelling errors either. And they've got guys whose sole job is to FIND that shit.
This. Two things stick out in my mind. The first is a highschool text book that stated the Whigs (The 19th century American political party, not the British political party) were the liberals of the day, and in favor of "pubic schools" -- typo not mine. I'm not sure what a pubic school is, but it certainly does sound like a liberal idea
The second one is in the first
Wheel of Time novel, where a passage involving a ride on a farmer's cart is used twice, with a couple of very minor differences, at different parts in the story. As far as I can tell, Robert Jordan wrote the passage, realized it would go better at a different part of the story, but wasn't able to rewrite the first instance of the passage before the deadline to send the book to the publisher. I've read two or three different editions of that book (First edition hardback, trade paperback, and possibly a mass market paperback; can't remember for sure on that last one) and every last one of them has been written that way, so even with subsequent printings, it wasn't fixed. Now that the author is dead, I sincerely hope it doesn't get fixed, as the alternative is having someone else rewrite part of Robert Jordan's work; as much as I've enjoyed Kevin J. Anderson's continuation of the story, I wouldn't want even him to alter the text of the original books.
What I'm getting at here is if products like this -- which have people paid to do nothing but make sure the final product is free of grammatical errors -- can wind up with major mistakes, it's asking too much for a fanfiction of any real length to be completely free of errors. Reasonably free from errors? Sure, but a truly spotless work is rare in any field.
