"T" is for "typo"

Robert Cottrell — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 15:37:47 +0000

Tim de Lisle, the deputy editor of Intelligent Life magazine, has pointed out to me that there was, until this morning (I fixed it just now), a typo in the standfirst to our Philip Pullman interview online.

What should have been a "thought" in the first sentence lost a "t" and appeared as a "though". Nothing surprising there: typos that don't get picked up by spellcheckers have a much better survival rate than those that do.

What surprises me now is that the piece was read by at least 45,000 people here on our site, attracted a comet's tail of comments, and yet Tim was the first to point out the typoâ€”alerted by the author of the original piece. Was the author the first to notice it, or the first to mind?

I assume we read less fixedly online, because the screen is harsher on our eyes (at least until our Kindles arrive); and that this helps us to skate over typos. I also guess that readers (other than authors) mind typos less online, unless mistakes are so intrusive as to destroy sense.

I would go on to guess that readers mind less, because they're sympathetic to the greater degree of improvisation that goes with small-scale online publishing; or (my approach, I think) they are more tolerant because they know mistakes can be fixed easily at any time, now or later. In absolute terms, they matter less.

But for whatever reason, context has a huge effect. A typo like that in the print edition of Intelligent Life would have been the cause of long faces all round.

Over lunch on Fridayâ€”Emily Bobrow and I took Enid Stubin to the Morgan Library dining room, but the dining room was overbooked, so we ended up in the cafÃ©â€”Emily cited the story of an internationally famous violinist who had busked for a lark in the New York subway, and found that nobody had paid him any special attention. read more »

Editing

"T" is for "typo"