My MS Word document full of typos is so long, I’m going to start adding at least two screenshots per entry for Typo Tuesday. At some point I may run low and change that, but I doubt it will happen soon because I come across typos all the time.
First up for today, we have another entry from the Wordfast CAT (computer-assisted translation) software I checked out before a job interview.
I find it kind of strange that CAT software would have this kind of error, but as you can see, under the “File Tab” section all three of the points start by saying “Some of this buttons will…” Certainly, it should say “Some of these buttons will…”
“This,” “that,” “these,” and “those” are what we call “demonstrative adjectives.” My ESL or foreign language student friends may have heard of this grammatical term, but it’s likely that my monolingual native English speaker friends have not. “This” and “that” go with singular nouns, while “these” and “those” go with plural nouns. Here’s a page that explains this further: http://www.grammar-monster.com/glossary/demonstrative_adjective.htm.
For today’s second screenshot, we have a page from none other than Stanford University’s website. When my husband got his current job in the Bay Area last year, for the heck of it I looked at websites of the nearby colleges to see if there might be a master’s degree program I’d consider. I’ve often thought of going to graduate school but due to cost and time concerns haven’t applied yet. It doesn’t stop me from looking around, though!
Anyway, I’ve thought of getting a master’s degree in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), so I poked around Stanford’s English department to see if I could find a TESOL program. I didn’t find TESOL, but I did find some poorly-written English. Rather ironic, don’t you think? Take a look:
First of all, I’d need to compare to other departments’ pages, but I’m a native speaker of English and I’m not sure what “Degrees for a Program” even means. Degrees for what program? Am I the only one who doesn’t get this? Do they mean to say “Program Degrees,” as in, the degrees the English program offers?
Aside from that, the description underneath that heading, which describes what one needs in order to apply, states: “Recent scholary or critical paper (12-15 pages) and Statement of Purpose specifying area of interested.” There are two mistakes there. “Scholarly” is misspelled, and also “interested” should be “interest.” For my ESL friends, “interested” is an adjective, while “interest” is a noun.
By the way, when I saw these errors, I emailed the department letting them know about it and asking about TESOL, and I received a very curt response. Not impressed. I haven’t checked back to see if they fixed it. Oh, well. It’s not convenient for me to go for a master’s degree at the moment, anyhow. I can’t help spotting their typos, though!
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