A Matter of Degree
May 23, 2011
In today’s Washington Post you can find a story in the Metro section about a typo on Georgetown University’s commencement program cover. The headline and much of the story’s content focuses on the transposition of two letters in the word “university.”
This is a blog about language and we’ve noted in earlier posts that the Post has lost its groove when it comes to producing clean, error-free copy. I’m not calling them out for noting the error. It’s just the degree to which they’ve highlighted it that irks me. For the newspaper to make such a big deal about a single typo strikes me as a case of people living in glass houses throwing stones. Notoriously, the Post has gone downhill in the copy editing department ever since they’ve thinned the ranks of what used to be one of the finest stables of copy editors around.
Yes, misspelling “university” is embarrassing and shouldn’t have happened. But I suspect it occurred for the same reason that it happens daily among the pages of the Post and in other publications: fewer people are taking on more work as resources shrink. It’s true at Georgetown, as it is true pretty much everywhere else.
I’ve made my share of typos (I made three errors in the first draft of this post which my husband caught. By the way, he caught two errors in the Post yesterday). When I have time I use the old proofreader’s trick of reading text backwards so as to catch errors that my mind might otherwise skip over. But, alas, mistakes still get through. So until we all replace our windows with Plexiglas®, maybe we shouldn’t throw such big stones.
–Barbara
Spellcheck is the Devil
August 29, 2009
It’s that time of year again, to put together the syllabi for my fall semester courses. One of the boiler plate admonitions I include is “Spellcheck isn’t proofreading. It will catch typos but not thinkos.”
The first night of class I always go over the syllabus with my new students and emphasize that they need to carefully check their assignments before turning them in. Spellcheck will catch misspellings but not recognize words that are used incorrectly. In fact, if your spelling of a word is really far off, it might suggest a word other than the one you’re trying to spell. I will invariably tell my new class about the student who, throughout his piece on Martin Luther King, referred to the slain civil rights leader’s tragic “assignation.” Hmmn.
And they always like the story about the woman I met who makes her living by running a direct mail business. Three thousand Christmas cards printed up on behalf of a congressman who—yup, you guessed it—talked about the blessings of “pubic service.”
Just before I started writing this post I checked my email and read one from Arlington County in which they discussed one swimming facility being torn down as a new one is built in its place: “Just yesterday we say [saw] the last of the old W-L bui[l]ding come down, marking the end an [of?] an ear, and finally showing to passers by on Quincy Street the beautiful facade of the new Aquatics Center.” The end of an ear?
An old printer’s trick is to read the text backwards so that your mind’s eye won’t fool you into thinking you’re seeing what you know should be there. If all else fails, marry an English professor and get him to read your work before you hit “send.”
If you have an embarrassing or funny typo/Spellcheck story that you’d like to share, please write a comment below.
