typos Archives - Page 3 of 4 - Scott Flood Writing

TYPOS AND MUSTARD STAINS

October 1, 2014 by Scott Flood

Are typos a big deal? True typographical errors, misspellings, incorrect homonyms and the like all get lumped together under the rubric of “typos” these days. Many people seem to accept them the way we’ve come to accept a certain percentage of rodent parts in the processed food we buy. (You do realize that the government … Read more

STILL MORE GOOFS AND GAFFES

July 9, 2014 by Scott Flood

“Will instant replay settle baseball’s furries?” That was the headline on an online story in the Hendricks County Flyer. I didn’t read the story, so I’m not sure whether it was a discussion of arguments between mascots or just a misspelling of “furies.” I’m also not sure if someone stumbled onto a miracle … Read more

ACCURACY IS AN INDICATOR

February 5, 2014 by Scott Flood

To some people, worrying about misspellings and typos is a foolish waste of time. They brush it off as some kind of annoyance or a miniscule matter that isn’t worthy of their attention — and they regard writers, editors, and others who do their best to spot and eliminate those mistakes as “anal retentive.”

My favorite analogy for typos is the sales rep who shows up in a perfectly tailored Armani suit with a dazzling silk tie and a smile to match. His sales pitch is perfect and his product is worthy of your business. But this poor fellow enjoyed a corned-beef sandwich at lunch, and he didn’t notice when a dab of mustard dribbled off the sandwich and onto his tie.

FOOLS ABOUT SCHOOLS

January 29, 2014 by Scott Flood

We’ll continue our ongoing series of typos, wrong words, misspellings, and other goofs with a look at three embarrassing mistakes by media professionals who were covering education issues. There’s a particular sense of unease when mistakes creep into education coverage (or, for that matter, when materials created by schools contain mistakes).

Eagle-eyed typo spotter Steve Gutermuth shared one from the Johnson County Daily Journal. The January 19 headline for an online story on local results of Indiana’s school evaluation system read “After grades drop, school puts pencil to pape.” We’ll assume that will improve its grad.

ASSORTED GOOFS & GAFFES

August 28, 2013 by Scott Flood

Time to take another look at public misuses of language. I won’t poke fun at private examples, but media, businesses, and others whose words are crafted for the public are fair game.

We’ll start with the Indianapolis Star, which is a constant source of typographical errors (especially online). Few are as amusing as the one that crept into a June essay about the World’s Ugliest Dog Contest. A caption spotlighting a particular hound referred to it as a “pure bread” dog. Not sure whether that was a reference to diet or muscle structure.

MORE GAFFES AND LAUGHS

January 9, 2013 by Scott Flood

Time to take another look at mistakes that wound up in print. Sometimes, I’m tempted to include gems from the Internet, but I don’t think it’s fair to poke fun at everyday folks, especially when they might be posting to Facebook from one of those smartphones with a touch-screen keyboard so small that it’s nearly impossible to get it right.

Professionals who should know better, on the other hand …

ASSORTED ODDS … AND ODDS

July 11, 2012 by Scott Flood

Sometimes people need to give thoughts to the placement of their signage. Take the convenience store I passed recently that had two of those temporary yard signs placed side-by-side on their wide green lawn. Being a well-trained human, I first glanced at the sign on the left, which said “Take ‘n’ Bake Pizza $5.99,” but any appetite that created vanished when I looked right and read “We have live bait.”

Can snack foods feel insulted? That was my first thought during a visit to a Target store, when I saw an aisle sign pointing the way to “Jerky Snacks.”

DO TYPOS REALLY MATTER?

June 20, 2012 by Scott Flood

As social media continues to explode, a subset of users is frustrating some posters and delighting many others. Viewed as the evil grammar police by their critics, these are the people who take time to point out grammatical and spelling mistakes in their friends’ and associates’ posts. Some of us see them as heroes.

The casual nature of Facebook, Twitter, and whatever social media channel we’ll all be using next month leads many users to take a fairly sloppy approach to communicating. As long as their meaning gets across to their followers, who cares whether it’s spelled correctly or structured properly?

PROOFREADING: DON’T NEGLECT THE OBVIOUS

May 25, 2011 by Scott Flood

Mistakes can be funny. They can be embarrassing. And when they’re in your marketing communications materials, they can also be costly or even dangerous. That’s why proofreading is so important.

My experience has taught me that there is a certain kind of error that proofreaders miss more often than any other kind … and it’s quite possibly the most embarrassing type (except perhaps for substituting a call-in sex line’s phone number for your own).

BIZARRE FUNDRAISERS AND A TORNADIC GOOF

May 4, 2011 by Scott Flood

While I’d never try to find the light side in the horrific tornados that scraped across the southern U.S. last week, I can’t let one story I read pass without comment. The story made reference to one of the Alabama communities that was devastated.

One line in the story read: Neighborhoods there were leveled by a massive tornado caught on video by a tower-mounted news camera that barreled through late Wednesday afternoon.

Did you catch what jarred my brain?