Oh, The Error

Somedays it's difficult to suppress the English teacher I once was. Today was one of those days.

I spent the morning combing my final galley of Stuck for errors. I found four that I hadn't found previously and e-mailed them to the publisher. I was still (ahem) stuck in my error-finding mode, though.

Later, I picked up the copy of Pat Conroy's South of Broad that I bought at the Discovery Shop last week. I was only a few pages in when a pronoun case error jumped from page 3. Do you see it?

Look at the sixth line down: At night, he would take my brother, Steve, and I out into the boat. . . . 

I should be me because it's a direct object of the verb take. My father would take my brother. My father would take me. My father would take my brother and me. Why did an editor not catch this?

If I were being especially persnickety, I might object to the plethora of commas in that sentence. Conroy doesn't need the first comma because the introductory prepositional phrase (At night) is only two words. Were it a longer prepositional phrase, then the comma would be necessary.

Conroy also doesn't need those commas separating the appostive Steve from its antecedent brother. A one-word appositive doesn't need to be set apart. In fact, using those commas makes the number of people in the boat unclear. Did Conroy's father take Conroy and his brother in the boat? Or Conroy, his brother, and someone else named Steve?

If an error or two has slipped through in the edits of Stuck, at least I'll be in good company.

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