We try to eliminate typos and grammatical errors from our scripts, but is that really necessary? At first glance, this is a stupid question with an obvious answer, but after reading a lot of shitty English-translated LNs recently, I lost sight of the actual principle behind why having a mistake-free script is important. Sure, there are instances where a grammatical error can make a line hard to follow, and of course those sorts of lines must be fixed in order to facilitate reader comprehension, but typos and other mistakes normally don't rise to that level. The official script for Oshi no Ko unfortunately contains more typos than normal per episode, and even though I read through the script with my full attention for editing and then once again for QC, I've missed several of them even though they're blatantly obvious when viewing the line in a vacuum. My brain sees the line and fixes the typo automatically, and I don't even notice it. If our brains are powerful enough to do those kinds of real-time fixes, how important is it that we get those lines right in the first place? This heretical thought has been bolstered by my recent experience reading LNs which have received varying levels of QC and me realizing that the number of typos or technical grammatical errors in a text has *zero* correlation to my enjoyment of it. So if careful attention to detail doesn't improve the viewer experience, why spend so much effort on it? One answer comes from the fact that what I just said wasn't quite true. There was *one* instance where an LN's blatant disregard for good copy editing actually hurt my reading experience in a meaningful way. At the end of a typo-ridden story about exorcists, the author's note that you'll find at the end of every LN was not titled "Afterword," as would be standard, but "After*ward*." The charitable interpretation of this deviation is that it was a pun on the whole exorcist thing (warding away spirits and all that). The uncharitable interpretation is that it was a mistake. Because the book had so many typos and grammatical mistakes up to that point, I was uncharitable and grumpy. If the book had been mistake free, I might have thought it was a pun and chuckled instead. Characterization has many examples of this sort of thing. If I have a character say "I work less hours than I used to," I want the viewer to understand that the usage of the slightly incorrect usage of "less" in that sentence (as opposed to "fewer") is saying something about the character speaking or maybe the setting in which the line is being spoken. There are some characters who would use the word "whom" correctly, and there are some characters who absolutely wouldn't (to the extent that it would be a *mistake* to have them use it correctly). But *you*, the editor, have to have a perfect handle on the who/whom rules in order to write a script that gets that distinction across to the viewers. You want your readers to be charitable to you when you make a character use poor grammar. You want your reader to believe that it is the character butchering the English language, not you. If a character in an anime is speaking rapid-fire and stringing a lot of sentences together, you want to be able to write a long, rambling run-on sentence without your viewers thinking it is a mistake. To accomplish all this, you have to stick to standard English and eradicate typos like your life depends on it. All of this is a long preamble to a minor complaint I have about Commie's editing in this show. Among the changes they made to the official script was a change from American English quotation punctuation rules (where commas and periods go inside quotation marks) to British English (where they go outside of them). In other words, Commie took lines with "punctuation like this," and they changed them to have "punctuation like this". Now, ask any nerd who cares even a little about English and you'll probably have a pretty easy time baiting them into going on a rant about how little sense the American rule makes compared to the British one. The following simple example (which uses British English) illustrates the point: `The title of the song was "Gloria", which many already knew.` The comma is part of the larger sentence rather than the quoted title, so *obviously* you should put it outside. There are many other "obviouslys" when it comes to this discussion. The British rule is better, plain and simple. Problem is, the Commie script is an American English script. It uses American spellings and phrases, and it was edited by an American. So the rule, under the particular strain of language that Commie is writing the script under, is that punctuation goes inside the quotation marks. But Commie decided that this particular rule—this bog-standard, English 101, *objective* grammatical rule—was not necessary to follow, presumably because that rule is admittedly dumber than the way they handle quotations across the pond. And it wasn't a matter of simply not following the rule, either, since Commie went *out of their way* to change it. Putting aside my personal thoughts about the merits of an editor making a frankly arrogant change like this (since even the use of the word "arrogant" seems far too aggressive for a discussion about punctuation order), we can use the discussion we just had about typos and grammatical errors to argue that the change was wrongheaded. Following a grammatical standard is *inherently* important, even if the rules in that standard don't make any sense. Like the "afterward" example, failing to follow a standard will take away your ability to break the rules in a way that entertains the viewer. To use a stupid example that I could nevertheless see happening at some point, imagine you had a scene in some comedy anime featuring some comically posh British folks, doing typical British things like sipping tea or standing in queues or whatever else Brits do. If you were editing the script for that anime, you could change the punctuation rules just for that scene as a joke for the viewers. If you think this hypothetical is far-fetched or that such a "joke" would be pointless, you're absolutely right, but the bigger point is that it's impossible to foresee when you might need one of the tools in the toolbox that standardization gives you. Subs: 01-13: Commie (via Dae), OVA: Dae. [Video quality comparisons](https://slow.pics/c/CKwMEcOn).