Fixing the world, one typo at a time
There are innumerable times I’ve wanted to do exactly this:
He was there to edit. Yes, edit. Toting markers, chalk and white-out, the man known as the Indiana Jones of typos had come to do battle with this city’s misspellings and botched punctuation.
Seattle, bookish as it may claim to be, was revealed to be barely literate.
There was the sign for “Dillettante” chocolate. The board announcing “Todays sample.” The posters for “recepies,” “cake’s,” “birthday candell’s.” The parking-lot warning that you get “no in/out priveleges.”
Oooh, just knowing those mistakes are roaming loose in the city makes me cringe. (I’d break out the red ink, but my technical writing instructor says it’s psychologically damaging to see your work return as a bloody mess of edits. To my consternation and her luck, I left my arsenal of eye rolling at home that day.)
It’s no leap to posit that these sign writers didn’t see enough red ink during their grammar school years.
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May 1st, 2008 at 9:46 am
Oh, me too! (And I think it’s less “psychologically damaging” to have these kinds of errors pointed out and corrected in the classroom—in red ink—than to see one’s gaffe in three-foot high letters or somesuch.)
May 5th, 2008 at 11:14 am
One of my fears, in trying to become a writer (because working as a clerk is less fun) is that I’ll pour my heart and soul into a work and get something like that back. Be it non-fiction or fiction; I’ll argue a point, or I’ll craft lovingly detailed characters and construct a reality in which all manner of things happen, and all I’ll get back on the day I submit a manuscript is loaded with typographical markers and a little note that says something like “too passe, write more edgy cute” or “it doesn’t possess a sufficient eccentric circle for complete deconstruction” or “needs less thinking” and that will be it. My days as a writer will be finished.