Can I share a pet peeve (one I have been guilty of myself) and turn it into a suggestion? If you write book reviews, don’t point out typos just to demonstrate that you can find typos or that an author/editor made some mistakes. You have a limited amount of space–why spend it listing a few pages where words are misspelled? Why not just send a note to the author or publisher? I saw a review recently of a non-academic book that is 959 pages, and the reviewer thought it would be helpful to list the four page numbers where he found typos or spelling errors, and the five pages where he spotted a split infinitive. (Though see the standard Chicago Manual of Style 5.106, 5.160 on why it’s “now widely acknowledged that adverbs sometimes justifiably separate the to from the principal verb.”)
With that said, there are times when I think it’s appropriate to discuss such issues–namely, when it demonstrates something beyond “a proofreader missed a few things.”
Here’s an example from Craig Blomberg’s review of Ben Witherington’s commentary on Matthew. Obviously this goes way beyond a book having a handful of understandable errors:
Unfortunately, one has also come to expect, particularly in the last few years, manuscripts from Witherington that are really not yet quite ready to turn into the publishers. This is, however, the first one where apparently no one at the publishing house was able to turn the rough draft into a publicly presentable form. Sentences are poorly worded and concepts are unnecessarily repeated, sometimes verbatim within just a few sentences of text. Just about any kind of typographic error that spellcheckers alone do not catch appears somewhere in the book, even in large print subheadings. Chapter and verse references have not been carefully checked. Transliterated foreign words, especially from Greek, are misspelled so often as to call into question even the author’s competence, especially with the determination of lexical forms of words. Endnotes have not been rendered via any consistent form, especially short second references. Dates, places of publication, and publishers, in both endnotes and bibliography, at times are just plain wrong. Endnote superscripts are wrong by one digit for pages on end on two different occasions. Wrong fonts or colors of fonts now and then appear. In the text itself, it appears that Witherington read and cited less and less secondary literature, particularly from recent scholarship, as his work on the commentary progressed. While it is perfectly understandable that he should often refer to his own previously published works (because he has written so many), where Matthew runs parallel to Mark not only did he frequently appeal just to what he had written earlier in his commentary on Mark but also his endnotes too frequently referred solely to Markan rather than Matthean studies.
Some sage once coined the proverb not to judge a book by its cover. In our high-tech age, we have to modify that into something like “don’t judge a book by its cover, color, typescript, pictures, accompanying CDs, sidebars, spacious margins, and so on.” This is a fantastic book in appearance. It had the potential for being outstanding in content and style as well. But, in his goal to write commentaries on every book of the New Testament and then get on to even more major projects, our author is working much too fast and/or not enlisting competent editorial help. This book deserves a revised edition that corrects these numerous deficiencies.
