Thursday

I frustrate my staff with my insistence on getting rid of every typo or clerical mistake in my documents. Why am I so petty? Because I make mistakes that don't get caught. If I then also allow mistakes that I catch go uncorrected, the documents will be a flaming mess.

And such mistakes could cost me legitimacy. Consider, for instance, what would happen if I neglected proper capitalization in this sentence, "I helped my Uncle Jack off his horse." (Example taken from For Who the Bell Tolls: One Man's Quest for Grammatical Perfection.)

And such mistakes could cost a client a lot of money: 10 Simple Typos With Surprisingly Huge Costs. Excerpt:

A cookbook published by Penguin Books of Australia, the Pasta Bible, caused quite a stir with a recipe for tagliatelle and sardines that called for a generous seasoning of “freshly ground black people.” Of course, this was a typo for “freshly ground black pepper” rather than a sudden swerve into spaghetti-based cannibalism. The publishers only discovered the error after a member of the public reported it to them. As a result, Penguin had to destroy over 7,000 copies still sitting in their warehouse. Reprinting the 7,000 copies cost the company about 20,000 Australian dollars ($18,000 US).