The Great Typo Hunt

Since the summer started, I've been doing a LOT of reading. Every night HB and I set aside at least 30 minutes to read before bed (well I read, he looks at guns on the internet). I've been averaging about two books a week. Some books have been great (The Girl Who Played With Fire), others have been bad (The Pioneer Woman), but even the bad ones haven't bothered me as much as the book I finished last night.

Last Saturday I picked up The Great Typo Hunt. Having had editorial experience, and enjoying a good book about language and grammar, I thought it would be a great read for me. And parts of it were. Parts of the book were very informative about language; the way it has changed, and the future of the way we write. But the majority of the book I couldn't stand.

First, I thought the whole premise of the book was rude. He assumes that people need to be educated on the the right way to write. That people must have made these mistakes because they simply do not know any better.

Yet most of these people are business owners. These people ARE intelligent, and have bigger goals than making sure every sign is editorially correct. I'm not saying that they shouldn't worry about it, it does reflect poorly on their business, but what I'm saying is that he assumes that these people don't know better or don't care. Maybe they just have things like balancing the books, stocking the store, and making their business successful on their mind.

This leads me to my other point - people make mistakes. Even good editors will make mistakes. In fact, I found two typos in his own book! A book that he, his co-writer, and an editor have all reviewed. Yet things slip through the crack and that is normal. We aren't robots - we are human. Yet he doesn't make room for the fact that these people just might have made one or two honest mistakes.

Lastly, a main argument he makes is that we NEED good editing to get a point across. That editing makes a sentence easier to read, and promotes communication. Yet his book is almost entirely composed of metaphors. Instead of direct, informative text (something he is promoting), he makes the book as hard as he possibly can to read by his use of metaphors and similes. Now, I appreciate a good metaphor, but it does make text more complicated unnecessarily, a result that he was trying to extinguish by correct typos.

Lastly, he thinks very highly of himself, something that I just cannot relate to. I would never be so confident to walk around telling other people that they are wrong.  In most cases, my lack of confidence is something I'm not proud of. Confidence is a positive attribute. Vanity is not.