Re: Penn State press: question about Chaucerian version dangers

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

As I have said in previous posts, based on my own experience as a 
copyeditor, even the most senior scholars make mistakes in 
quotations, citations, and the like and their unedited prose is 
also sometimes not as clear as it could be. So, yes, among the 
dangers could be misinterpreting what the author of an article 
actually meant to say because it was unclear or ambiguous. And 
mistakes in quotations often get repeated because people rely on 
the "authority" of the author as expert and don't bother to go 
back to the original text to check for accuracy.

Sandy Thatcher

>Sandy Thatcher wrote:
>
>Maybe this would be acceptable if all one were doing was
>discussing the basic ideas conveyed in an article and citing the
>VoR as the source, but it would be dangerous to rely on the
>postprint solely and quote from it since the final editing may
>well have caught errors and made other changes in the
>peer-reviewed draft.
>
>Question for Penn State press:
>
>Looking at the list of Penn State journals, I am puzzled about
>what exactly the dangers would be of reading or citing a
>postprint.  For example, what would be the danger, exactly, of
>relying on a postprint of an article from Chaucer Review?
>
>Misinterpreting Chaucer, perhaps?
>
>Sandy Thatcher's post:
>http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/1001/msg00121.html
>
>Heather Morrison, MLIS
>The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
>http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com