Rant: Proofread!
I've been doing some research (read: Googling) on Stephen Foster. Of the three websites I've decided to use, none is error-free.
One is German (the site is available in both English and German, but the author is clearly German) so I make some allowances for the altogether weird sentence structure. It's got a wealth of information, but is difficult to read.
The second is detailed, very informative, but on the second page misuses it's/its (one of my biggest pet peeves) and has other grammar errors and comma misuse sprinkled throughout.
The third site says Foster was born in 1926, and then goes on to describe his work from the 1840s. This one's published by the Songwriters' Hall of Fame.
Not a huge deal, really. I'm hardly one to throw stones since I make errors all the time, particularly things like the last one. (I'll probably have a typo in this post. It's an ironic law of the universe of some sort.) But all of these could have been fixed, had someone with a decent knowledge of grammar and an eye for details looked over the text before it was posted. And maybe they did, but they didn't do a great job.
It just seems to me that there's an attitude that because something's on the web, it doesn't need to conform to the same standards as printed material. That makes sense, because it doesn't. It's far easier to publish something online than it is to publish it on paper. The problem is that increasingly, online material is being used for research in the same way written material is. One way to solve the problem is, of course, to be discriminating--I'm using the resources mentioned above in conjunction with very reliable printed material and cross-checking all my facts.
But it sure would be nice if it had been edited.
Edit: I found an its/it's error on the Songwriters site too. Augh.
One is German (the site is available in both English and German, but the author is clearly German) so I make some allowances for the altogether weird sentence structure. It's got a wealth of information, but is difficult to read.
The second is detailed, very informative, but on the second page misuses it's/its (one of my biggest pet peeves) and has other grammar errors and comma misuse sprinkled throughout.
The third site says Foster was born in 1926, and then goes on to describe his work from the 1840s. This one's published by the Songwriters' Hall of Fame.
Not a huge deal, really. I'm hardly one to throw stones since I make errors all the time, particularly things like the last one. (I'll probably have a typo in this post. It's an ironic law of the universe of some sort.) But all of these could have been fixed, had someone with a decent knowledge of grammar and an eye for details looked over the text before it was posted. And maybe they did, but they didn't do a great job.
It just seems to me that there's an attitude that because something's on the web, it doesn't need to conform to the same standards as printed material. That makes sense, because it doesn't. It's far easier to publish something online than it is to publish it on paper. The problem is that increasingly, online material is being used for research in the same way written material is. One way to solve the problem is, of course, to be discriminating--I'm using the resources mentioned above in conjunction with very reliable printed material and cross-checking all my facts.
But it sure would be nice if it had been edited.
Edit: I found an its/it's error on the Songwriters site too. Augh.