How To Find Typos in What You've Written

Be Your Own Copyeditor

Nov 19, 2008 Gregory C, Erickson

A typo that appears in what you've written can be either a mild annoyance for a career-threatening disaster. Here's how to catch typos that would otherwise slip through.

The title of a professional whose newspaper or magazine job it is to catch typographical errors (and a wide range of other mistakes) made by writers is copy editor. This is the person who, seeing the date Wed., Nov. 15, 2009, won’t sleep well unless he or she checks a calendar to make sure that Nov. 15 of that year is really a Wednesday.

The copy editor will also know or check to ensure that, according to the style rules being followed, Wed. and Nov. are to be abbreviated in that way, or not.

The copy editor will remember, or search and find, that Harry S Truman’s middle initial (which really isn’t an initial because it doesn’t stand for anything) carries no period. And the copy editor will note that “Govenor Pallin” contains two misspellings.

The Copy Editor Is a Dying Breed

If you’re lucky enough to work alongside a professional copyeditor (or even if you just know someone who’s happy to help you catch boo-boos), thank your lucky stars. But if you have to go it alone, you could be in big trouble. And you’re probably going to have to go it alone, eventually.

Last June, according to Gene Weingarten, columnist for a publication of no less linguistic correctness than The Washington Post, “Dozens of copy editors left my newspaper through an early retirement buyout.” He spent a page in The Washington Post Magazine (June 22, 2008) humorously but sincerely lamenting what he felt sure would be a dramatic decrease in overall editorial quality as a result.

Do-It-Yourself Copy Editing

Even if you write for a major newspaper, it seems, you’re going to have to clean up after yourself.

What if your memo to the company president hits his desk with his name misspelled? What if your press release goes out with the date of the stockholders’ meeting wrong? What if your annual report shows yearly profit with a zero missing? What’s a harried worker bee to do?

To Find Typos, Read it backwards

That's right: Read it backwards. If you’ve written a book, this isn’t feasible. But if the piece is copy for a product catalog, a memo or a press release, this can be done, and in less time than it would take to make a trip to the boss’s office for a chewing out. Print out the piece. Turn to the last page and begin reading it from right to left, backwards.

Read it word for word backwards, going so far as to tap the tip of your pen or pencil on every single word as you go.

This takes each word out of context and presents it as separate from the surrounding material. Paragraphs and sentences fall apart, and that’s exactly what you want. Old things look new and unexpected to you. Thus, the typo in “Mary had a little lamp, its fleece was …” now smacks you right in the face. A spell-check program wouldn’t have caught it.

One last thing: The bigger the type, the bigger the typo. When the font is large, it seems to yell, “Don’t worry—I’m too huge to be wrong!” Check headlines more carefully than anything else. How? .course of ,backwards them reading By

The copyright of the article How To Find Typos in What You've Written in Technical/Business Writing is owned by Gregory C, Erickson. Permission to republish How To Find Typos in What You've Written in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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Comments

Dec 21, 2008 12:49 PM
Terence P Ward :
Truman's middle name/initial was more confusing than you might think - he didn't ever express a preference himself!

Nicely written, and very helpful.
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