On Not Worrying About Typos on Blogs
Here’s Penelope Trunk’s perspective on typos on blogs:
There is a new economy for writing. The focus has shifted toward taking risks with conversation and ideas, and away from hierarchical input (the editorial process) and perfection.
As the world of content and writing shifts, the spelling tyrants will be left behind. Here are five reasons why complaining about typos is totally stupid and outdated.
I don’t totally agree with her angle, but I do think we should be lenient about typos on blogs (and, as a time-pressed blogger, that’s a relief). It’s interesting to read the whole thing.
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Follower of Christ. Husband of one, father of three. Director of strategy at Desiring God. This blog exists to help equip Christians in good works, because that's what productivity is really about.
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In my view, tolerating typos is a symptom of three deeper issues:
1. The belief that there is no such thing as truth. (There IS a true way to spell a word.)
2. The preoccupation with speed.
3. Laziness.
Anything worth doing is worth doing well. Slow down, use the spell-check application, and represent your ideas with clarity and quality.
My goal in writing is to communicate a message to the reader. When punctuation and correct grammar ruin the flow, it hurts my chance of attaining that goal.
By and large people care less and less about the placement of comas or the use of an em-dash—but they care very much about sentence flow, engaging word choice, and well thought out type layout.
Old school editors could just follow rules—today it’s an art and editing is just one of the brushes a content producer has to paint with.