"The Phenomenology of Error"

I think William's text points out the ambiguity of violations of grammatical rules, and how such "errors" occur in our ordinary readings but we don't catch them or think of them as errors because they happen so often. In his article, he states that when reading a freshman's paper vs. a published paper, one pays more attention to the errors of the freshman's paper because it is expected to have errors, while the published paper is just assumed to be written flawlessly, even though the errors made in each paper are often the same kinds of errors. In his article, he indicts mutiple writers including E.D. White, Fowler, and Barzun of stating a grammer rule, and then violating it. Fore example, E.D. White stated a rule about parallelism and using which vs. that, but violated his own rule. The violations are trival ones, but still these writers are hypocritically violating these rules. When editing/grading papers, I think it is more important to correct to the more obvious errors, although I think the trival errors shouldn't be overlooked entirely because the more trivial errors we overlook, will likely lead to more and more errors that become placed in the "trivial" category and those too will start becoming overlooked. Kind of like a snow ball effect. All in all though, the "errors" in the article that the author pointed out were hard to catch and really didn't make any significant difference to the reader, and should therefore sort of be overlooked, since almost no one caught them as errors in the first place.