Welcome back to another edition of Typo Tuesday! I have a long Word document full of typo screenshots I’ve taken recently, but today’s post comes indirectly from a comment I received on yesterday’s post. The comment was about the ubiquitous misuse of the word “literally,” and in finding an article to add to my response, I came across not one, not two, but three typos in a small section of the article I found.
Keep in mind, I only skimmed the article, so there may be even more errors I didn’t notice — and there probably are more errors to find if I was able to find three in just a small area. I took a screenshot of the section where the first typo popped out at me, and in the process of cropping the picture, I noticed two more! Can you find them? I’ll post the original screenshot and then the same shot with boxes around the typos. Here we go…
How did you do? Here’s the second picture:
As you can see, these typos are simple formatting errors. A spell checker should have caught all of them. “College-educated” should not have a space between the hyphen and the second word. “Few diehards” is made of two words, clearly, while “literally” is one word, without a space. Easy!
One thing which could be seen as an error is the fact that “Time” is capitalized but not italicized, but that depends on the style manual of the publication. Personally, I prefer to italicize book, magazine, newspaper, and other media titles, but that’s my personal preference. I was taught to underline book titles but that was, ahem, a few years ago, and it doesn’t seem to be the convention many places anymore.
So that’s it for today!