July 23, 2010

Preventing Typos in Revised Text

Here’s a technique for avoiding typos, and two illustrations of how errors can pop up in carelessly revised text.

The New York Times ran an online article and slideshow this week with two errors that probably came from careless text revisions:

1.

2.

– From Suzy Menkes’s “Conjuring Temples of Deep Desire” and the slideshow

“Peter Marino’s Creative Genius,” nytimes.com, retrieved July 23, 2010

 

Typo 1 has two periods. Someone probably selected one or more sentences to remove, but didn’t select the final period before hitting delete.

Typo 2 started because the Times uses an optional apostrophe for the plural of acronyms like HMO and LED. For the slide, someone must have inserted the cursor before the s in “LED’s” to type in the word “light” – incorrectly keeping the apostrophe. Plurals formed with incorrect apostrophes can seriously damage a writer’s credibility.

You can solve both problems by selecting your text carefully before you add words or hit delete. And careful proofreading is almost always a good investment of your time!

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For tips on sentence structure and apostrophes, see our updated book Professional Writing Skills: A Write It Well Guide.

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