Poor grammar and obvious typing mistakes

[LkS]

First off I don't want to criticise the site too much because it's great and I really enjoy reading it. However I regularly see grammatical errors and mistakes that are obviously due to mistyping. This is fair enough; everyone makes these mistakes but that is what proofreading is for. I just can't see how so many obvious mistakes make it onto the site. These kind of mistakes are generally ignorable but sometimes they can make the article difficult to comprehend and tiring to read. This problem is most prevalent in the short news stories on the right hand column. Anyway like I said I don't want to criticise too much but I feel this kind of presentation could damage Tom's reputation which I don't want as much as anyone because I enjoy reading it and want to see it keep on going strong.

Thankyou for the otherwise excellent site.

 

[Earthworm_Jim]

I have also noticed many grammatical errors/typos/etc. in tom's articles as of late. I've been a tom's reader for several years, though I never posted much on the forums, and the number of articles with clear editing issues worries me.

I read Tom's because it provides well thought out insightful articles about things I'm interested in. Editing errors give me the impression that authors aren't bothering to reread their posts, and the editors aren't reading them at all - making me question if the articles I'm reading are indeed well thought out. How could they be if the author's aren't bothering to reread them to check for errors?

I have a lot of respect for Tom's, and you guys have done an amazing job providing useful info about all sorts of technology, but I'd like to see Tom's editing staff step it up a bit.

 

[CyBerC]

Let me start by saying that I have worked in IT for years and I hate to say this about my favorite site, however I think that there was improper planning and implementation by Tom and Co. on the changes to their sites. It felt to me that it was a rush job and done with inexperienced people. To me the site is a disaster. They have so much information to offer to us all and they have made it very hard to find things now that were once easy to find.
Pages load slow. It took me 45 minutes to get to where I am now and I have a very fast connection to the net. The CPU charts are a mess and comparisons are practically impossible. Many buttons on pages do not work.
I hope they get the site back to great state it was in before the change.
Someone said that Tom's has so much to offer and they were right.
I just want it to be easy to use once again. Sometimes, as we all know, not all upgrades workout and are a step backward.

 

[gallupe]

"MySpace Wins Another Wins Another Spam Lawsuit " horrendous editing if any? why do we want to read crap from uneducated and pathetic commercial site. "bestof media" does not pay enough to get qualified writers. the site SUCKS and is just about not usable due to the wait for ad servers. etc etc etc.

 

[ubertiger]

ha, as I was exiting this thread I notice the targetted ads for proofreading courses - perhaps the TH employees should sign up.

Does no one from TH actually come into this forum to comment on these theads? Obviously there are issues to be dealt with here, I've looked at 3 threads with valid arguments regarding website problems and I don't think I've seen one official reply!

FFS post your articles into Word then grammar and spell check them before posting them online.

The articles become very difficult to comprehend especially when your referring to codes and model numbers. When you get them wrong or mix them up it makes me doubt the credibility of the rest of the article as I'm not sure I can trust the information in it is accurate. SORT IT OUT!

 

[fulle]

Lol, yeah. The first reply to most of the news articles is usually a quote including some blatant typo.... The articles themselves, though, are usually pretty well written otherwise. When I was in college there seemed to be an abundance of jobless English majors, basically begging to proofread my broken garbage. Where are they now?

 

[I]

"Criticise" about errors and mistakes? PRICELESS!

 

[cangelini]

First off I don't want to criticise the site too much because it's great and I really enjoy reading it. However I regularly see grammatical errors and mistakes that are obviously due to mistyping. This is fair enough; everyone makes these mistakes but that is what proofreading is for. I just can't see how so many obvious mistakes make it onto the site. These kind of mistakes are generally ignorable but sometimes they can make the article difficult to comprehend and tiring to read. This problem is most prevalent in the short news stories on the right hand column. Anyway like I said I don't want to criticise too much but I feel this kind of presentation could damage Tom's reputation which I don't want as much as anyone because I enjoy reading it and want to see it keep on going strong.

Thankyou for the otherwise excellent site.

Thanks for the feedback LkS.

There is absolutely no excuse for spelling and grammatical issues--I agree with you. Every feature piece that goes up is proofed by our freelance copy editors and then tech-edited by myself before publishing. With that said, errors do make it through on occasion and I try to monitor the feedback section of each story to correct anything that is picked up. Style is another issue entirely--keeping writers around the world tied to a given style sheet can be a challenge.

Nevertheless, I sincerely hope that the occasional copy errors are not too distracting of an issue to you; you have my word that as much emphasis as possible will go into publishing clean editorial feature content.

Best,
Chris Angelini

 

[number13]

let me see if I can put this is the correct view, cangelini, is on the staff and telling us that they use freelance copy editors, from which country, India or Pakistan, since you publish in 12 countries I may be right,BOM everyone that leaves here has a bunch of other places to go, most of us already post in other forums like PCW or TR, and it's the forum members that help keep this place going, management doesn't like being criticized, but then the NYT is in serious do do because people get tired of complaining about issues and management won't/don't listen, so if you think that we don't matter, well, it is your future, we can leave at any time, BTW I think that I may see what the problem is really, I went to your corp site and you have 4 news articles, only one for this year, pretty sad if you have 30 million readers(really?) and that is all that you have for news

 

[randomizer]

Actually, the forum members really don't keep anything "going". There are 227962 registered members. Of those 227962, I estimate that 226500 post in only one thread or not at all. Of the remaining 1462, maybe 150-200 post quite regularly (again just an estimate since I just go off what I can see, not hard numbers), and the remaining 1300 odd people used to post regularly but don't any more. 200 people is not even close to 30 million.

Do you think that the majority of readers even look at the comments on articles, let alone post comments?

 

[cangelini]

let me see if I can put this is the correct view, cangelini, is on the staff and telling us that they use freelance copy editors, from which country, India or Pakistan, since you publish in 12 countries I may be right,BOM everyone that leaves here has a bunch of other places to go, most of us already post in other forums like PCW or TR, and it's the forum members that help keep this place going, management doesn't like being criticized, but then the NYT is in serious do do because people get tired of complaining about issues and management won't/don't listen, so if you think that we don't matter, well, it is your future, we can leave at any time, BTW I think that I may see what the problem is really, I went to your corp site and you have 4 news articles, only one for this year, pretty sad if you have 30 million readers(really?) and that is all that you have for news

Surely you see the irony in this well-formatted, spell-checked, and copy-edited post?

 

[randomizer]

absolutely,i can,see the irony, in that post, but that doesn't, mean it should be ignored,does, it?

 

[B-Unit]

You guys are trying to be a legitimate IT news website, get some people who understand how the English language (and all the other languages you publish in) work. Its never a tricky thing that's messed up, its simple things, things I was taught how to correct in the 6th grade...