“Why do people take such pleasure in discovering typographical errors—typos, in the trade term—especially in putatively august publications? I confess I do. Is there a touch of Schadenfreude in it? Not so much ‘see how the mighty have fallen’ as ‘see how sloppy, sadly incompetent, bereft of standards they have become.’ Catching a typo heightens the reading experience, making a reader feel he is perhaps just a touch superior to the author, his or her editors, and, it does not go too far to say, the culture of our day.”—Joseph Epstein, “Why Cry Over Split Milk?”, The Weekly Standard, May 10, 2010
Like Joseph Epstein in his characteristically droll and erudite personal essay, I have spotted typos aplenty myself and made more than my share of them.
It’s easy to detect a mistake made by others, particularly when you come to a piece for the first time. Repeated viewings make it harder to catch these—the mind’s instinct is to glaze over what you’ve already seen once.
I can't be the first to argue that computers might have made matters worse. Sure, your word-processing program might have a spell-check function. But as often as not, it will flag what’s fine in the text (the “dame” in “Notre Dame” triggers a response about outdated sexist usage) but not a thornier problem: a word spelled correctly, but not in the context in which it appears your text—“their” instead of “there,” for example.
The situation, for myself and others in the digital age, is even worse for bloggers, where the imperative is to post with speed rather than accuracy.
As the great disintermediating force in modern life, the Internet allows a blogger to become his or her own editor. This can be a decidedly mixed blessing.
On the one hand, there isn’t a gatekeeper who, for whatever reason, interferes with how you write. On the other hand, all too often, even the best of us needs to be saved from our worst mistakes—particularly when writing late at night, when the eyes grow so bleary that you can’t believe what you created when you re-read it the next day. (E.g., in choosing a label for a post, you select, say, “Smokey Robinson” instead of “Smokey Joe Wood.”)
And that brings in the army of regular readers from the Web, all ready to save you from your reign of error: what the late William Safire, in the pre-digital age, called “the Squad Squad.” After I’ve posted to Google, at least one of these sharp-eyed readers (and he knows who he is!) will alert me to a mistake. Sometimes, I’ll even catch it myself, after I’ve been away from the piece for a few hours and have a chance to re-read it with a fresh eye. Then I’ll correct it before posting it to Facebook, where the majority of my faithful readers--God bless 'em, every one!--reside.
Like Joseph Epstein in his characteristically droll and erudite personal essay, I have spotted typos aplenty myself and made more than my share of them.
It’s easy to detect a mistake made by others, particularly when you come to a piece for the first time. Repeated viewings make it harder to catch these—the mind’s instinct is to glaze over what you’ve already seen once.
I can't be the first to argue that computers might have made matters worse. Sure, your word-processing program might have a spell-check function. But as often as not, it will flag what’s fine in the text (the “dame” in “Notre Dame” triggers a response about outdated sexist usage) but not a thornier problem: a word spelled correctly, but not in the context in which it appears your text—“their” instead of “there,” for example.
The situation, for myself and others in the digital age, is even worse for bloggers, where the imperative is to post with speed rather than accuracy.
As the great disintermediating force in modern life, the Internet allows a blogger to become his or her own editor. This can be a decidedly mixed blessing.
On the one hand, there isn’t a gatekeeper who, for whatever reason, interferes with how you write. On the other hand, all too often, even the best of us needs to be saved from our worst mistakes—particularly when writing late at night, when the eyes grow so bleary that you can’t believe what you created when you re-read it the next day. (E.g., in choosing a label for a post, you select, say, “Smokey Robinson” instead of “Smokey Joe Wood.”)
And that brings in the army of regular readers from the Web, all ready to save you from your reign of error: what the late William Safire, in the pre-digital age, called “the Squad Squad.” After I’ve posted to Google, at least one of these sharp-eyed readers (and he knows who he is!) will alert me to a mistake. Sometimes, I’ll even catch it myself, after I’ve been away from the piece for a few hours and have a chance to re-read it with a fresh eye. Then I’ll correct it before posting it to Facebook, where the majority of my faithful readers--God bless 'em, every one!--reside.
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