Dirk Strasser
  • Home
  • Dirk's Blog
  • World of Ascension
  • World of Aurealis
  • Dirk's Short Story Worlds
  • Dirk's Children's Fiction Worlds
  • Dirk's Other Worlds
  • Dirk's Real-life World
  • Dirk's Giveways

She spooned the soup from her bowel – the joys of typos!

5/19/2014

0 Comments

 
This bowl typo appeared in a close-to-final draft of my fantasy novel, Zenith.  Unfortunately, spellcheck won't pick up an error like this.  Even more unfortunately, I didn't pick it up.  I was lucky because a friend of mine saw it on a read-through and had a good laugh at my expense.

You've got to ask yourself: why did I write it, and after I’d written it, why didn't I pick this up?  I know the difference between bowl and bowel – and why you would want to spoon something out of one, but not the other.  I guess typos happen because typists are human, and it’s only human to make mistakes.

One theory puts a lot of typos down to the “fat-finger syndrome” where your fingers hit two keys at the same time on a keyboard or two buttons together on a touch screen.  That could have been the case with my bowel typo – the “w” and “e” are next to each other on a QWERTY keyboard.

Simply trying to write something too quickly is another reason for typos. Recent Search Engine Optimization research has indicated that misspellings probably occur in around 10% of search queries.  Typo-squatters actually use this to make money by registering a possible typo of a well-known website address hoping to get traffic when internet users mistype that address into a web browser.  Or even more sneakily, they deliberately put typos into a webpage or its metadata so that search engines direct people who make this error to the site.

Here are some typos that obviously didn’t make it through the checking processes.

These two prove that no word is saef from the typo-bug:
Picture
Picture
Sometimes, it’s just one letter that makes the difference:
Picture
Picture
Picture
Sometimes it’s two letters:

“Germans are so small that there may be as many as one billion, seven hundred million of them in a drop of water.” – Mobile Press US

“I have a graduate degree in unclear physics.” – job application

Sometimes writers should really hang their heads in shame:
Picture
Picture
Well, does we?

Sometimes the correction is funnier than the original typo:
Picture
Picture
Sometimes the typo correction has a typo correction:
Picture
Typos are funny things.  Thank goodness for editrs.

This first appeared as a guest blog on The Right Book For You.
0 Comments

    Author

    Dirk's a writer, editor and publisher of science fiction, fantasy and horror

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    October 2019
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    March 2017
    March 2016
    February 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    December 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed


Copyright text © 2013-2023 Dirk Strasser unless otherwise attributed

Credits and Acknowledgements
Photo used under Creative Commons from col&tasha