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:
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:
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Sometimes, it’s just one letter that makes the difference:
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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:
“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:
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Well, does we?
Sometimes the correction is funnier than the original typo:
Sometimes the correction is funnier than the original typo:
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Sometimes the typo correction has a typo correction:
Typos are funny things. Thank goodness for editrs.
This first appeared as a guest blog on The Right Book For You.
This first appeared as a guest blog on The Right Book For You.
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