Looking at Typos from a Different Angle

I recently found an article online that got me thinking about those pesky little things called typos. It seems to me that traditionally published books these days seem to have more and more typos. This could mean a lot of different things. It could mean that there are less copy editors in large publishing houses. It could mean that the system has inherent errors because publishers allow authors to send in last minute changes via email. It could mean that authors aren't as careful these days because it's so easy to fix typos in this digital ocean of words. It could mean, simply, that we are more accepting of these things. Or maybe not.

The article says:

Rushing to publish and overlooking glaring typos may have become part of the new economics of traditional publishing. But on the Web, typos sometimes come with a price. “Spelling mistakes ‘cost millions’ in lost online sales,” said a BBC headline last week. The article cited an analysis of British Web figures that suggested that a single spelling mistake on a e-commerce site can hurt credibility so much that online revenues fall by half.

That seems pretty drastic, don't you think? Over a TYPO? Would you stop coming here to the Literary Lab if you found typos in our blog posts? Well, we always have typos in our blog posts. Oh well. I guess you also don't pay to visit here, do you? My other question is do you put a book down when you find typos in it? Because when I read the Twilight series, I will tell you that I was utterly shocked by the amount of typos in all of the books. I could have taken a red pen to those things! Still, I did enjoy the story and I couldn't tell you what the typos were now. I only remember that they were there.

How much do you let typos affect your judgment of a piece of literature? A blog post? Do you think less of the author? It costs publishers a lot of money to fix typos even in an e-book version of a novel, let alone a print run. This is why many typos just go unfixed and "overlooked."

I think the most interesting thing I've learned today is that perhaps we shouldn't look at typos from a different angle.

Bad spellers are a breed apart from good ones. A writer with a mind that doesn’t register how words are spelled tends to see through the words he encounters — straight to the things, characters, ideas, images and emotions they conjure. A good speller, by contrast — the kind who never fails to clock the idiosyncratic orthography of “algorithm” or “Albert Pujols” — tends to see language as a system. Good spellers are often drawn to poetry and wordplay, while bad spellers, for whom language is a conduit and not an end in itself, can excel at representation and reportage.

Interesting, eh? The point is that we are human and we make mistakes. It's interesting to think that the typos I see in a finished product today might mean that I'm seeing more of the real author behind the work instead of an over-polished art piece. In a way, it's refreshing to think that the typos in my own published novels are signs of me as a person - and my publisher, as well - rather than unforgivable errors.

I used to be the type with a stick so far up my...well, you know...that a typo sent me on a silent rampage inside my head. How dare the publisher miss this stuff and interrupt my reading experience! How stupid could they possibly be?

Now, well, I'm getting a little more relaxed on the subject. I'll still try harder than ever to keep typos out of my work, but if they happen to occur all the way to a final published piece, I won't freak out too much.