It’s not often that proofreading – or lack of – becomes a front page news story, but that’s exactly what happened last week,

Another typo-related story, with the potential for a more serious outcome, was reported by the Daily Mail in the same week. An American man accidentally pressed the 0 key instead of the 8 on his mobile phone when setting up a bank payment. The error meant he was 80 cents short on his mortgage payment, triggering a letter threatening him with foreclosure despite him sending a cheque for the outstanding money. The bank has since rescinded the warning, but the man has decided he’ll stick to cheques in future!

Another Mail Online story reported the rather foolish vandalism attack on Justice Secretary Ken Clarke’s house by a group calling themselves Real Fathers for Justice. If you’re going to the effort of buying spray paint and breaking into a property to vandalise it, you’d think you’d make the effort to get the spelling right too!

Finally, a report by IT security company Sophos discovered that making mistakes when you type in a URL can have serious consequences thanks to “typosquatters”. These unscrupulous souls register domain names that are very similar to existing websites, in the hope that people will mistype the URL and land on a rogue site instead. Sophos looked at six popular websites –  Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple and their own site – and investigated over 2000 domains that had one character added, deleted or changed in the address – for example, twitterz.com  and facemook.com. The report found over 80% of the domain names had been “typosquatted” and while most of them were harmless, 5% were either adult or cybercrime sites. Landing on one of those would be a nasty shock if you were just trying to buy a new iPad …

So what’s the point of me reporting all these stories? I’m not a grammar Nazi (despite popular opinion!) and proofreading isn’t the be all and end all of life – but these stories do demonstrate that you need to have your proofreader’s head on, even on social media sites!

The latest high profile case of this was featured in The Guardian on Saturday. The story led like this:

The American author Jonathan Franzen might justly be called a perfectionist: his latest opus, Freedom, took nine years of painstaking effort to complete inside a spartan writing studio – and is now being widely acclaimed as a modern masterpiece.

So it is particularly unfortunate that, thanks to an apparent mistake by his typesetters, the version published in Britain has been found to be littered with errors.

In a highly embarrassing move, publishers HarperCollins were today forced to offer to exchange thousands of copies after Franzen revealed that the UK edition of a novel dubbed “the book of the century” is based on an early draft manuscript, and contains hundreds of mistakes in spelling, grammar and characterisation.

The publishers are alleging that the copy of the book that went to print was in fact an early draft, not the final version. Incredible really – it only takes a simple numerical renaming of every draft to see easily which the latest one is – but then, mistakes do happen.

So how will this impact on HarperCollins? It could prove very expensive for them if they are to recall all 80,000 copies. Fellow publisher Jonathan Blake comments:

HarperCollins is not planning a full scale recall of the 80,000 hardback copies in bookshops for logistical reasons. Such a print run would have cost the publisher around £70,000, with distribution and other costs ramping the amount up to around £100,000.

In other words, unless purchasers specifically request a replacement, the incorrect books will remain on the shelves! Before you rush out to stock up and sell them on eBay, there’s little chance that they will become valuable or collectible though, with such a high print run.

(Full article here)

Clkoser to home, I have dealt with clients who made similar mistakes – and it has cost them dearly. One company asked me to proofread the copy for a new website – but not till after the site had gone live. The site was littered with mistakes so not only did they have to pay me for the proofreading, they also had to recall the web designer, whose bill for editing the site wasn’t small.

And I’ve lost count of the number of people I meet who have errors in their marketing materials. They know they’re there, but they didn’t get them properly checked before the artwork went to print. And with most businesses running on tight budgets, there’s not a lot you can do with 5,000 incorrect leaflets other than hand them out despite the typos!

So okay, this is a business plug, but it’s also a very inexpensive tip too. Before you send anything off to print, get it checked first!

I discovered this on a recent family holiday. Much to my children’s horror, wherever we went I was constantly spotting errors! I guess I should have been totally off duty and kept them to myself, but it’s difficult to resist blurting out “They’ve made a mistake here!” whenever you see a typo!

The worst example was a leaflet for a country park that we visited. In four places “disabled” was spelt “disadled” and there were two or three other spelling mistakes on the flyer too. Did it stop us visiting the park? No. Did it change my perception of the place? Yes, a little bit. It all comes down to attention to detail – if the owners of that park are a bit sloppy when it comes to detail, does that affect the way they approach health and safety etc? Who knows.

It seems that wherever you go, whatever you do, there are typos and errors – and us proofreaders just can’t help spotting them. On a shopping trip a while ago I noticed that a big poster on the wall advertising a broadband service actually talked about “braodband”. A leaflet handed to me at a school meeting last night had two typos on it, in a very prominent position. And twice in recent weeks I’ve spotted typos on people’s business cards – one of them in the email address!

Fortunately I’m not the only person in the world with this particular curse, but we may be few and far between. It took at least two weeks for someone to notice the error on this road sign on the busy A429!

I’d love to hear about any very public typos you’ve spotted!

One of the most high-profile typos in recent months has to be the “ground black people” in an Australian cookbook. The phrase, which of course should have been “ground black pepper”, appeared in The Pasta Bible and led to all 7,000 copies being destroyed, at a cost of over $AU20,000! Amazingly, the Head of Publishing at Penguin Australia defended the proofreader responsible for  letting the error through, saying that they would have been “concentrating on checking quantities, a common source of error in cookbooks” and that as almost every page would have included ground black pepper as an ingredient, he saw this as “quite forgivable”. Not so forgivable when it was an expensive error that caused a lot of offence too …

This next error was spotted in Birmingham by 4Networking member Richard Heathcote. Perhaps the error is intentional and aimed at getting people to talk about it – in which case it’s certainly worked. Mind you, I think I’d be wary about buying a property built by a company who apparently show so little attention to detail …

Apparently, the building opposite had an identical poster but with “appartment” instead of “aptartment” …. and that apostrophe shouldn’t be there, either!

Finally, an error closer to home (for me anyway) that appeared in the Oxford Mail – a newspaper that is no slouch when it comes to typos. This one is probably one of its best/worst though, depending on how you view it. Check out the entry for March 2008 … Now I know local councils come in for a lot of abuse, but maybe this is going a step too far?!