Typos...

I suppose this could be a paradigm for life in general, but it comes up because I seem to catch typos in these posts after they have been posted, usually when they show up in an email from a reader. Sometimes I think they are as persistent as bed bugs. I found one that had been hiding out in my LinkedIn profile for at least a year, and had even escaped a public review of the post at a workshop where my profile had been used as an example. Spell check doesn't help much and I think it tends to make you lazy about hunting them down. Besides, this blogger doesn't have one and when I do these in word and paste I don't like what happens to the font.

Usually I read them aloud, preferably to someone else, like my wife. She can also be a help in fixing something wacky I've written. Recently someone asked me for advice about writing her blog and this was one of the things I suggested. The other was about getting ahead of deadlines, self-imposed or otherwise by banking a few posts ahead. [BTW, my savings account is nearly depleted, so these may come a little less frequently.]

The reading aloud thing I got during my first job out of college. I was an "assistant to" an old PR guy at a bank. After he first spent several weeks evicerating my copy with a pencil and I started to get better, he would have me read what I had written aloud. I'd catch my own now less frequent gaffes when I did it. If he wanted to be a little snarky about something, he'd read them aloud, exaggerating my punctuation choices. Ouch! "I'm an anti-comma guy," he'd announce, when deconstructing one of my run on compound-complex sentences. He was a character. A gentleman C's Harvard grad in the late thirties, he'd served on the fast battleships in the Pacific as a Lieutenant Junior Grade. Having been trapped in an ammunition hoist at some point with live ammunition, he never took elevators. Fortunately our building was only nine stories. He had worked for a by then folded city newspaper and done a stint doing PR for Ford during the Edsel days. I remember feeling particularly pleased the day I got a piece of copy by him without a pencil mark or an argument.

For someone who got put in remedial reading in third grade, I started writing well by my high school years. College sharpened my skills. Two people should be acknowledged. One was my seventh grade English teacher. I don't know if they still teach kids how to diagram sentences, but she was a sentence parser par excellence. While I still get confused about the technical grammar lingo, I learned something from her about putting words together. My first year in college in one of those big education factory co-op schools--it was what i could afford--the basic English writing class they had was brilliant. It was brilliantly taught for my section by a young instructor who was absolutely committed to teaching it well. Basically, we spent our class time writing and then reading aloud what we had written. We might have been given a topic to think about or not, but we just wrote.

I got pretty good, to the point where one grad school prof used to tease me that he sometimes wasn't sure that I was writing brilliance or bullshit, but that whichever it was it was superbly written. My ability made me a little lazy about studying, because I knew in a pinch, that I could knock off a 1500 word paper in a sitting. I knew I was good at it, but I had no idea how good until I started reading student papers as an instructor. I really do wonder about our school system now.

Anyway, I started this with something to the effect that typos and finding escaped ones is a "paradigm for life." I'm not exactly sure where I was going with that, but it's something like this. We make little not very visible mistakes all the time, at least I do. Catching them before, during, or after making them takes some effort. It used to take a lot more in the days of typewriters and carbon paper. Our technology has made it easy to be sloppy because it has made things easy to fix. Bad habit for those mistakes that aren't in photons on a screen. I think I want to keep working at attending to this. You can do what you like, but for me, cleaning up after myself feels like the right thing to do.

Kind of a silly little musing, but there it is.