dianaschnuth

I see these all the damn time online. I suppose I shouldn’t be so continually surprised that professional organizations are apparently bereft of their copy editors in the rush to get news posted online. But typos in ads? This banner ad ran on CNN.com for several weeks before a corrected one appeared.

I’m such a stickler for typos anymore. I guess I always was, but I’m finding them even more lately. I just finished reading a trade paperback — a Sci-Fi Book Club printing, I believe, of The Dragonriders of Pern — that was embarrassingly rife with typographical errors. They’re like speed bumps; they take me right out of the story. I can’t fathom how a three-in-one book like that got published with so many typos. Don’t these companies have editors? Even for a reprint, mistakes happen, and I’d think there would be someone to catch them.

Simple errors like that can make or break a professional relationship, especially one so dependent upon the written word. Would you trust a newspaper that misspelled the word “missile”?