Tag Archives: typos

Thank your for you support!

Posted on by under About writing, Generic Rant, Movies

Typos are everywhere. I can’t think of a single book that didn’t have at least one. And I read a lot of books. In fact, a recent novel by one of my favorite authors had at least two. Heck, my books (You know, the ones listed here. 🙂 Ironically, a typo in one of those titles caused Amazon to list it twice! Can you find it?) barely have that many. One of my favorite examples is in the written word in the middle of a movie. You can read about that one in this post.

Sometimes, it’s not clear whether an error is a typo or whether it’s just ignorance of the English language. Here’s a prime example from an article about a local community, which bragged that it…

…is infamous for its support of our local artists, writers, and musicians.

In a world where literally and metaphorically have become synonyms, why not famous and infamous? (I know those two aren’t antonyms or even mutually exclusive, e.g. Trump, but hopefully you get the point. They’re way different.)

The most common typo, however, the grandaddy of them all (and as a grandaddy, I assure you I know what I’m talking about) is the substitution of “you” for “your”. This mistake is virtually (not literally) omnipresent in cyberspace. I swear I don’t read an email, blogpost or even legitimate article that doesn’t have this failure. The most recent I can remember is this comment I saw on an article I read not too long ago:

Thanks for writing you article.

I don’t recall if the article itself had the error. I hope so.

Writing is hard

Posted on by under About writing

hardwritingThe truth of this title is self-evident to those for whom writing is an important part of life, whether as vocation or avocation. They know. Others might accuse me of hyperbole. Everyone gripes about how difficult their work is for them. How hard can it be to sit on your duff all day and string together a bunch of words that make sense?

Harder than you’d think.

Writing a quality book, play, screenplay, short story, poem, article, or other piece of literature is, as we say in Boston, wicked hahd. Legendary sports columnist Red Smith, when asked whether churning out a daily column was hard work, replied, “Why, no. You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”

Garbage, on the other hand, spews forth with a lot less resistance and little or no shedding of the crimson.

Writing blog posts can be the easiest writing task or the hardest. It’s easy if all the writer is interested in is dumping random thoughts with no focus on accuracy or the quality of the prose. If you’ve read many blogs, you know exactly what I mean. No disrespect intended, but those are the literary equivalent of the old SNL Colon Blow cereal. As long as there’s mountains of output (words), that’s good enough.

The hard part is the unrelenting self-imposed “deadlines”. I’m committed to putting out a post every Tuesday for this blog and every Saturday for Limping in the Light.

In spite of those deadlines, I always want to put my most literate foot forward. (I think it’s the left.) One thoughtless typo and I look like a moron. Cranking these posts out twice a week, I don’t have a lot of time to obsess over editing. (I do have a life.) Anyway, self-editing is usually a futile effort. Because my schedule might warrant it on any particular week, I confess to have pushed out posts prematurely. As a result… mistakes were made.

These factors provoke all sorts of qualms at every stage of the post creation process. The blank screen, the self-doubt, the self-critique, the hesitance to expose my work (and by inference, myself) to the world all conspire to make the process more agonizing than it should be.

Hopefully readers will show some grace as they read these hastily scribbled sentiments, especially those readers who are interested in purchasing any of my writing. This shouldn’t be cause for concern. There are enough poorly written books and movies that it’s clear (1) there are a lot of poor writers out there, and (2) the vetting process is imperfect. I’d rather not rely on that state of affairs, but until I have nothing to do except write a couple of blogs – nice work if you can get it – I’ll simply slog along as well as possible given the circumstances. Posts might be short and they might be of varying quality.

Thank you for your understanding.