Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

A partial list of boo boos I have seen in published documents over the years. If anyone had read these things, surely they would have found these things. Right?

I guess an editor or someone like that should have read this, but it appears that no one did. Here is a partial list (I cannot list them all, even a blog post wouldn’t hold that):

• Copyright notice on public domain information (especially on software)
• The same diagram put in 40 different figures instead of 40 different diagrams in 40 different figures
• One document containing different version numbers in the headings of different pages
• No dates
• No authors
• Redundant phrases redundantly used introducing redundancy

Did someone read this before hitting the Print button? Perhaps if someone had, these mistakes would have been corrected. Then again, these mistakes aren’t “critical” or some other adjective that means “we cannot possibly let people know we (don’t) care about these things.”

I think published documents should be correct. I have felt that way for years. It may be some type of birth defect. Is there a medicine for that malady? Let’s all try to do better.