Journey of Light

The Dreaded Typo (a bane on writers everywhere).

I just gave what I thought to be an exceptional review (technically more of a review of a review in certain respects) and discovered that the review had at least two typos. Sigh. Why is it that I triple and quadrupedal check my work and still miss these silly little mistakes. If it was a story post, I could go back and fix it easily enough, but once a review is officially posted, those mistakes are forever there for the world to see. If I get the approval of the person I wrote the review for (08-10-12 @ 12:21pm) I'll include the links. These dreaded typos are inescapable. Try as we might, no matter how many flawless articles, stories, reviews we post, sooner or later, a typo is going to rear its ugly head... and it'll probably bring some of its buddies along with it for the ride.

What makes a typo so dredful is that it can be anything. It can be the missing letter "a" from the word dreadful in that last sentence. If you write car when you meant to write can, that's a typo. Or saying you were writting a story when you meant writing, but you'll never notice that you stuck in a 2nd "t" until it's too late. A typo isn't always an added, missing, or inadvertently replaced letter. Typos can be too much or too little spacing between words or paragraphs. Typos can be whole words or phrases added, deleted or even replaced with completely different words or phrases. "I should have should have taken care of that." I've done the repeated phrases a few times, usually during the revision process. "I warrant to tell a story, but I just can't get my ideas across." The underlined word should be wanted or wished, but for whatever reason a word like warrant makes it onto the page instead. I've written typos like that one and didn't notice until other people pointed them out. Typos include misplaced punctuation, punctuation like periods, comma, apostrophes, you name it. Basically any time anything is inadvertently added, replaced, or duplicated that doesn't belong, or something that belongs is left out, that's a typo.

The only solution to the typo is to recheck your work multiple times, put it aside, come back later, recheck it again, then get your peers to recheck it for you. Only then can you guarantee there are no typos... Until you discover that somehow all your rechecking failed and your peers couldn't spot the typos either. Typos are unavoidable. By all means, avoid them whenever possible. If you're diligent, they'll be exceedingly rare, but they will nonetheless pop up when you least expect them.