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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27603
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27603
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Whether such a threshold exists or not is irrelevant, since you can never know whether you have met it or not.

If you detected an error, you would fix it, so the number of known errors is always zero. The number of unknown errors is unknown because you can't count unknowns. Therefore there is no way to know if you have an error rate below any given threshold.

Of course, over time, readers may discover errors in your work. There is no way to know if any one reader discovers all the errors, or if all the readers collectively have discovered all the errors, since a) they don't report them systematically, and b) you can never know how many undiscovered errors remain.

This means that you can know if a work has passed the acceptable error threshold for an individual reader if they write to you and say, "I discovered 10 errors in the first 73 pages so I stopped reading." But that does not mean any other reader will ever notice all those errors, or that if they do it will provoke them to stop reading and write you a nasty letter.

Finally, even if no reader has found enough errors to stop them reading yet, that is no proof that the next reader may not be more sharp eyed or more irritable than than all the others may not find enough errors to trigger their refusal to read on.

A much better measurement might be this: the rate of error discovery. That is, how many errors do you find and fix in each pass through your work. Presumably this number will decline each time through. How many errors do other readers discover each time they read it? You can then set an acceptable error discovery rate per pass for a certain number of readers as a measurable quality metric.

Of course, the Web changes all of this, because now errors can be fixed after publication, something that even extends to published ebooks which can, like software, download periodic updates.

Original score: 1