Typos - by Jo Carroll

We all make them, don’t we? In that glorious rush to get

words on paper fingers get muddled and our wisdom can emerge as gobbledegook. So we edit, edit, edit – honing our wonderful sentences until they say exactly what we want them to mean.

Except sometimes they don’t. In our heads they are wonderful, because we see what we think we’ve written. But the reality can be wobbling tenses, repeated words words, missing punctuation so one sentence runs into another and the whole thing makes no sense at all and even speellings that hide in the sentence undergrowth and confuse here and hear.

I know, you’ve read the thing six hundred times and are convinced that this time it’s perfect. And then along comes Nellie (probably aged about six, with a reading age of eight) and spots twelve mistakes in the first paragraph and it’s all you can do not to chew your own arm off with frustration because YOU ARE MEANT TO BE ABLE TO DO THIS STUFF!

So – this is a plea – how do you spot them? I’ve read the following nuggets of advice, tried them all, and still the b*ggers slip through:

·       Print your piece in a different, unfamiliar font – you will read it more carefully. (I’ve tried this so often that all the fonts are familiar to me now, except the one that looks like handwriting and I draw the line at working with illegibility).

·       Print your piece and read it in reverse: you’ll stop noticing the narrative and find it easier to spot mistakes. (I wish – though it does pick up a few.)

On top of this there seems to be some sort of rule that typos leap out and smack you the second after you’ve posted the piece, or pressed send. Why is that? How come they lurk until that very moment you can do nothing about them?

Does it matter? Yes, I think it does. I get a copywriter to check my books, but can’t afford one for every short story submission or piece for a journal. And they matter because I’m a pedant, and I am irritated by mistakes in books – we claim to be writers, so we should be able to spell. There’s something unprofessional about leaving 'their' when we mean 'there', and don’t get me started on 'your' and 'you’re.'

But please, if anyone has a fail-safe way of spotting them before pressing send, please share it with the rest of us.

You can find more of my writing at http://www.jocarroll.co.uk - and please let me know if you find typos there, so I can correct them.