Behold the Power of Typos

If you ever get a job as a teacher – and I am not for one moment suggesting that you ought to – you’re probably going to end up dealing with typographical errors in work that is handed in for credit. If you’re a reasonably conscientious teacher, you’ll probably have some standards for writing quality, whether that means taking off points for spelling and grammar errors, or taking off points after a certain number of errors, or taking off points if you can’t actually decipher what your student is trying to say, or what have you. And if you impose any standard above “you turned it in, therefore you get full points” you will probably have someone argue that your standard is too strict sooner or later. “After all,” your students will whine, “What harm can a single typo do?”

If you’re ever asked that, I suggest you bring up a story that turned up in the Canadian news online over the weekend. According to the C-Net News page , a situation developed in the Canadian version of the McDonald’s Monopoly game this year, when the web page for McDonald’s Canada Division mistakenly said you could win the $1 million grand prize with the Park Place token. In reality, you need the Park Place and Boardwalk tokens, just as in the original game, but whoever wrote the copy for the web page apparently left out the “and Boardwalk” out of the critical sentence. A minor typo; the omission of only two words, but with a potential multi-million-dollar consequence…

Now, I don’t pretend to be a particularly good writer of English; I’m one of those people who consider the invention of the spell-checker to be more important than fire OR the wheel in the rise of human civilization. But in many ways I think those low standards make me less tolerant of sloppy editing, rather than more: if I can do better than the level of proficiency being displayed, I always think, the person writing it certainly could have. I’ve never handed in a major class assignment without getting at least one additional pair of eyes on it, for example, and I’d certainly never sign a contract without getting a lawyer’s opinion on it. Yet every day we see people embarrass themselves in public by not taking any such precautions; Jay Leno has built an entire comedy institution around this principle (the highly successful “Headlines” feature on the Tonight Show) and it has been the source of much humor, not just in the Internet era, but in fact for hundreds of years of history…

The real problem is that people do not think about the scope or importance of their actions. If I leave a typo in a blog post there’s a good chance that no one will ever know; only a few people ever read these things, and all of you are much too polite to start mocking me because I misspelled something. On the other hand, if a lawyer puts the wrong word or phrase in a contract his or her client could be sued for millions or billions of dollars, and his or her career could be effectively over. And if a major corporation puts an incorrect contest rule on the Internet for all to see, the results could include lawsuits, humiliation, and being mocked by millions of scruffy bloggers…

Which is why teachers like me are going to go right on marking off points for blatant misspellings and other technical errors in the assignments we receive – even if none of us could necessarily do any better…