I’ve been taking pictures all year of errors I’ve spotted “in the wild” — on signs, in stores and other places out and about. Most were the “grocer’s apostrophe” — using an apostrophe to make a plural. But there were a few other types, and a couple of two-fers to boot. Enjoy.
Underlining and bold face exist for emphasis. Quotation marks serve their own purpose. But that doesn’t stop people from mixing them.
(Revised from a guest post originally written for Voxy.com that also appeared on Ragan.com)
Writers and editors have a lot to juggle in making prose presentable: big-picture items like accuracy, clarity, flow and structure, as well as details like grammar, spelling, punctuation and word choice. Details matter: one wrong word — even one wrong letter — can change the meaning of a sentence, or make it confusing. This is why editors especially need a keen eye for detail (plus a sense for smooth writing, and that little bell in your head that goes off when something seems not quite right).
One of the regular features Grammar Monkeys does on Twitter is “When spell-check won’t help”: sentences that have a wrong word that’s still a word. It’s not flagged by spell-check, but it’s a mistake that can throw the whole sentence off — or make it unintentionally funny. We find a lot of these in copy, and now people tweet them to us as well (thanks to @grammarsnark, @madbeyond, @EATutor and @bergly for some of the examples below).
These errors fall into several types:
The one-letter-off typo
One letter can make a big difference.
“The nation’s intestate highway system.” (interstate)
“The company’s head of new-produce development” (new-product)
“The heaving helping of caviar” (heaping)
“The pops concert, canon launch and fireworks show” (cannon)
“Moral was low in that office” (morale)
“A list of businesses that asses the additional charge.” (assess)
Typo hunters Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson stopped in Wichita on Monday night on their book tour for “The Great Typo Hunt.” The book chronicles their cross-country odyssey of correction a couple of years ago, which included several hundred typos spotted, a few hundred typos fixed, and one federal court case. Before their lively reading to a packed house at Watermark Books — including a quiz that determined who the “Grammar Hawks” and the “Grammar Hippies” are, and a list of the five worst typo-caused disasters in history — they had time for a little chat.
The pair said they haven’t been actively hunting typos as much on the book tour because they’re focusing more on touting the importance of proofreading — heading typos off at the pass, as it were. That, however, doesn’t mean they didn’t find any here in Wichita. (Billboard on Kellogg that says “Lets” instead of “Let’s,” this means you.)
As prizes for audience members, Jeff and Benjamin brought slimmed-down typo-correction kits, but they also had one of the originals with them (at lower right in the photo). The kits contain Sharpies, Wite-Out, pens, chalk, dry-erase markers and crayons, which they said they didn’t use much but felt they should include anyway. When asked which typos were the easiest to fix with these implements, they said anything with chalk. They added that signs with movable sliding letters are easy to fix, but are often high up and thus not easily accessible. Any typos high up are tricky to fix, they said, and some — like ones in neon signs — are just impossible. ”Some of them you just have to let go,” Benjamin said.
