Typos Cloud Communication

In The Great Typo Hunt , Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson recount one of the odder road trips you’ll hear about: a journey to find typos. Because, Deck says in a Salon.com interview ,

Typos cloud communication, which is the primary purpose of writing. If your text has typos, it’s going to take your readers longer to read it . . . . It can also be a warning sign that whatever text you’re looking at was created by someone who might not be paying that much attention.

Predictably, the absolutist “language evolves” crowd , who seem unable to make some obvious distinctions, criticized them for their efforts in favor of clarity:

We came under criticism from people at two different ends of the language philosophy spectrum. In our book we refer to it as the hawk versus hippie dilemma. You have grammar hawks who are ready to jump on anything that has the risk of being non-standard and call it a mistake, and, on the other hand, you have descriptivists who basically have a free-for-all approach. At its most extreme, descriptivism argues that most of these typos aren’t mistakes, it’s language change in motion . . . .

[But] if you look at certain errors on an individual level . . . these are not pieces of evidence of some growing consensus; these are just individual errors. They’re something that I think you can in pretty good faith go after.

They don’t mention one habit that drives me bats: putting quotation marks around words for no reason, which I often see on handmade signs. As in: < “Read” First Things magazine > or < Don’t “make” any typos >. The writers don’t seem to be using quotation marks for emphasis, they’re just putting words in quotes.