Books were rare treasures in the Middle Ages, painstakingly copied out by hand. So how to protect them from theft? Scribes sometimes added a curse to the first page of those books that was supposed to keep thieves away — and some were as vicious as...
Steven Pinker’s new book, The Sense of Style, which Martha cites among her all-time favorite books about writing, has just the right message: don’t worry so much about the errors, because you’ll make them, and if writing isn’t fun, you’re doing it...
To get your fix of amusing typos like, “Illegally parked cars will be fine,” and other errors that can’t be mentioned on public radio, try the book Just My Typo. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Amusing Typos” Like, oh my God...
Editors are great for picking up those double the’s and similar mistakes, known as eye-skip errors. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Eyeskip Errors” You know when you’re editing and you think you’re done and you have somebody else...
Can you get away with calling a misspelled word a typo if you didn’t know how to spell it in the first place? One variety of mistake is called a performance error, where the goof is somehow related to the machine or keyboard. A competence error...
Craig Silverman’s book Regret the Error contains a maze of a correction that simply corrects an incorrect correction. You can also follow more recent collections of corrections on his blog at the Poynter Institute. This is part of a complete episode...