Thinking About Typing And Typos
Published May 13, 2006
Mistakes happen. As a journalist for more than 15 years, I made my share of typos. Typos and other mistakes in journalism are important for several reasons:
- What may seem to some like a small mistake, such as the misspelling of a person's name, can have huge, terrible consequences. The theory goes that every person who reads the person's name and knows it is misspelled will proceed to question everything else they read.
- While television news does a terrible job of admitting mistakes — reason #2,888 that I prefer newspapers to television news programs — newspapers usually do a good job of acknowledging an error occurred and apologizing for it. Good newspapers run corrections in the same place each day, often page one for mistakes that occurred on the front page and page two for most other mistakes.
- The catching of mistakes by readers, when added to mistakes admitted by reporters and staff, leads to credibility problems.
Since nobody is perfect, some mistakes are to be expected.
One of the difficult parts about being a journalist is that your mistakes are so public. When an accountant, for example, makes a mistake but it is later caught, the public is none the wiser. But if a reporter interviews a man named John Smith and assumes Smith is spelled the usual way then realizes it's actually spelled Smyth, the reporter is going to look like an idiot. Many reporters insist on getting business cards to confirm spelling and titles.
Complicating matters, readers assume the reporter is responsible for the wording — and spelling — of the headlines and photo captions when that is often not the case. Let me give some personal examples.
One of the more common mistakes reporters make is leaving out the L in the word "public". Spell-check agrees that the mistake is a word and presto: We now have ourselves a pubic hearing. One of my more embarrassing mistakes was referring to a person as the "pubic works manager." Tough job, I am sure. Fortunately, he took it in stride.
Some mistakes are pure stupidity. I wrote obituaries at the first newspapers I worked for. One day I came to a Hispanic name I did not recognize. As the gender of the deceased was not stated I did something stupid, I guessed. Long story short, I guessed wrong and the family called howling the next day and I felt like crap. After that I always checked even if it meant interrupting families still grieving.
- Thinking About Typing And Typos
- Published: May 13, 2006
- Type: Opinion
- Section: Culture
- Filed Under: Culture: Media
- Writer: Scott Butki
- Scott Butki's BC Writer page
- Scott Butki's personal site
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Comments on this articleComments
Nice job.
So I should liten to empty headed music to empty my head and type and then run the spell checker, right? If I can dig out the piece on spell checkers my father-in-law sent me, will it help?
Scott, if I screw up more on my typing will you turn out more articles on the subject?
Finally, point out to your students that what you are teaching them requires thought - an enemy when you want to type 100 words per minute...
Your city is not the only one with a pubic works department. My current hometown's department gave themselves that title in the front page headline of a newsletter on water quality they published a couple years back.
A.L., thanks
Ruvy, yes maybe but don't use that as a rationale to make more errors.
Victor, that's hilarious.
There were points off taken for mistkes in our copy but it wasn't done in a way that made the
sstrategy unattractive.
So if I had 100 wpm it'd go down to 80.
What killed me was when I interviewed for one newspaper job and they had me take a typing test but it was a typewriter so old it did not have any way of correcting mistakes.
S
That was a disaster.
DO other people make typos?
I'm still proud to get Fugazi, Harry Wong and
Elements of Style in the same piece.
Worse than typos are interviews with the completely wrong person, as took place here
when BBC interviewed the wrong guy.
I was thinking today about a typo made in a resume.
It was a resume of a new public employee.
Among his distinctions was serving on a committee to assist then President Nixon with giving the public a positive "massage."
When I interviewed him for a story announcing his hiring I said Nixon never struck me as the type to get massages, let alone encourage others to get them.
Although it did make me wonder if Watergate could have been avoided if Nixon had just gotten some good massages and been less insecure.
Turns out he was working with Nixon on giving a message to the public, not a massage. I agreed to fix the typo for the news story but I never forgot that one.
Here's a great new one.
Excerpt:
"Apparently the Pima County Sheriff's Department hasn't heard the saying that loose lips sink ships.
A "law-enforcement-sensitive" information alert on terrorist activity stamped repeatedly "Do NOT release to the public or media" was sent out Monday to pretty much every media organization in Southern Arizona.
In a Keystone Kops-style maneuver, Lt. Karl Woolridge, in the Special Operations Section of the Sheriff's Department, sent an e-mail to members of the media instead of to its intended recipients."
CNN
apologized yesterday after television anchor Kyra Phillips took a toilet break but inadvertently left her personal microphone on - and broadcast live in excruciating detail her bathroom gossip session during a nationally televised speech by US President George W. Bush."
From Slate:
"A correction from today's Post: "The Sept. 15 Weekend section incorrectly indicated that the movie 'This Film is Not Yet Rated' is rated NC-17. It is unrated."
Oops!
Newspaper Prints Names of Jurors In Murder Trial
A Cincinatti newspaper makes a major mistake: Printing the names of jurors. The link takes you to an apology - but the damage has been done.
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Excellent article Scott.