I wish the authors would proofread

I think some spellcheckers are also to blame. Every word processor has a spell/grammar checker and sometimes they insert something or automatically change something while you're writing and you don't even notice until you proofread. You can turn some of these functions off, but I find them quite useful most of the time.
I wrote a story spelling the word "pervert" as "prevert" to make a specific point, and of course the spellchecker automatically corrected it. I had to make sure it was spelled the way I wanted it because the whole point would have been lost had been spelled correctly (it was a boy's misunderstanding and mispronunciation of the word that was at issue).
I'm sure everyone here does the best they can, but some misspellings are especially egregious, which leads me to believe that indeed some word processor functions are to blame more often than not. I'm pretty sure my story is otherwise error free, but I only proofread it three times...
btw, ordalie, nice smilie. I saved that one for my own use...

When I write, I make sure that virtually every "automatic" feature is turned off. Spell check putting in the wrong word as you type, grammar check changing things - that has been mentioned, but then there are lists, formatting, quotation marks, etc.

When list points. say you write "I want you to:
1) go to your room,
2) take off your dress,
3) bent over the bed, and
4) wait there until I have time to correct your horrid behaviour"

then go to copy it, well if you let the word processor make the list for you then most times the numbers will disappear when you copy and paste the list. Because the numbers aren't really there - there's some invisible code that says "format this as a list" but the actual numbers aren't really part of the document.

Then there are quotes. More specially "intelliquotes" that use open and close quotes rather than plain " . They aren't a huge problem here but on many forums you'll see things like:
##/ I want you to: /##
and other garbage like that because of the codes used for those quotes.


Back to typos, they are the bane of my existence. For me, a story has to age a bit before I can find them all. Case in point - the recent Halloween story I post was written almost a year ago. I ask people on another board help proofing and three people were nice enough to go through it looking for typos - all of which were fixed. Before sending it here this year I gave it one last look - and the typos lept off the page at me. There had to be another dozen or so that no one had noticed that needed fixing.

When I read something I've written, I know what I had meant to say so my mind corrects the details for me. It's a bit like those things that get forwarded around that start "fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too".

Then again, no one here is paid to write. None of us are professionals. If mistakes happen, mistakes happen. If you want perfection then buy spanking novels because you get what you pay for.

Goodgulf

You are quite right, Guy. The stories, until the challenge voting is closed, are not validated at all, but you read them exactly as they come from the entrants. We have the 'delight' of validating them later.

I can't really add any tips to the sage advice of my predecessors on this thread. Just make allowances, be understanding and award your votes accordingly. There's no point in getting angry.

I have to reread my stories several times to catch all the typos but even then I can still miss some. I have noticed that if someone else proofreads my story they can do a better job of it than I can and I can do a better job of proofreading somebody else's story. That is because the author sees what he wants to say instead of what is on the actual page, another reader doesn't have that problem.

My word processor, LibreOffice, just underlines possible mistakes in red which gives me the option of changing them or not as I choose. And you can add new words to the list such as "spanko".

Also I find that if I print out the story in hard copy it is a lot easier to find mistakes than when reading it on the computer monitor.

By the way, LibreOffice is free on the Internet if you don't like Microsoft and it will save documents in various formats although .odf is the default format. I used to use OpenOffice but the latest version seems to have many glitches.

Proofreading is easy. You simply read the story backwards.

I know what my stories should say, so when I re-read them I sometimes don't notice errors. I think that the important thing to remember is that we're all human and as such mistakes are inevitable. I think what I'm trying to say is that it's best for readers just relax a little. Maybe there is no such thing as a mistake just a learning opportunity?

Occasional mistakes happen, of course, and several people have rightly said that when you re-read your own stuff, you often read what you know it should say. There are also examples of the perfectly proper use of ungrammatical English in direct speech or letters. Having just posted "Telling it like it was", deliberately full of errors, I could hardly argue otherwise.

However, a piece with several mistakes in the narration does suggest carelessness and the same applies to factual mistakes. If, for example, an American writer offers a story about an English lawyer and uses a term commonplace in America but foreign to England (or, of course, the converse situation happens), or if England and France are stated to be at war in 1816, or an English landowner is keeping an African slave IN ENGLAND in 1820, these are careless factual errors which a quick look at the internet would have corrected.

Yes, readers should be relaxed about such things - but in the particular circumstances of a challenge on which the reader has to vote, I think good English and avoiding factual mistakes are worth rewarding.

I do proofread, but things still slip through. An occasional word. The thing that really bugs me are minor continuity errors, a name change or something like that and I always do a headslap when I catch them on a read through after they've been published. Overall, I find here that very few errors make it through the process, though.

Continuality errors can be hard to spot. Partly because TV and movie are so inaccurate when it comes to showing the past.

For example, the "Victorian England" scenes of the Tim Burton treatment of Alice in Wonderland, where Alice's mother had to ask if Alice was wearing a corset and Alice talked of exploring places where there were already British colonies - those scenes were almost as fantastic as the Wonderland ones. But if you didn't know much about that time period you might think that those scenes were realistic.

Or any historical drama where modern sensibilities have been shoehorned into the characters, where all it takes for someone to tell them how we live and all the people in the past would go "Hey, that's right! We should give equal rights to everyone! Women, minorities, and even non-landowners should be allowed to vote.".

What gets me sometimes is the language - it changes over the years and to hear someone use the wrong language for the period, well it's grody to the max. Really radical man. Not mellow at all, it shifts me out of my groove.

But flaws with continuality are a more basic problem than typos. Me, I'm understanding with them when those flaws show up in free fiction. The fact that someone took the brave step to post a story can matter more than that first story being perfect.

Goodgulf

Presumably this is what the Dylan song "Wheels on Fire" which was a hit in the UK in 68 by Julie Driscoll was all about!

To err is human Ordalie.