I was just reading an enewsletter from a friend. One article was pretty choppy and I wondered if he had proof read his work before hitting “send”. (I’m guilty of that myself at times, that’s why I’m glad you can at least update blogs!).
But as I was thinking about that, here came Marcia Yudkin’s reflections on the cost of “typos”. So I wanted to pass that along. Hopefully it will help our marketing today…
When your typos make the news, you can look not only careless but also wasteful.
In late March, Arkansas governor Mike Beebe called the state assembly into special session partly to deal with a typo in 2007 law that had mistakenly allowed girls of any age (even infants) to marry with their parents’ consent. A special session costs taxpayers about $25,000 a day.
(Chuck’s Note: When you are a poor southern state already, your state motto is “The Natural State”, and your ex-governor is Bill Clinton who’se best know for his “Monica’s” then something like this is just more fuel to the fire for redneck jokes! What’s more this is just proof that politicians never read legislation before voting and signing it which, itself, ought to be illegal.)
Around the same time, a candidate for a Congressional seat in West Virginia discovered that the Secretary of State’s office had misspelled her name on the ballots. According to state law, the error must be corrected at taxpayers’ expense - costing $100,000 - $125,000.
(Chuck’s Note: West Virginia - PLEASE learn from Arkansas before doing this next time!)
Is one answer to such flubs using the “auto-correct” function in Microsoft Word? Definitely not. In the May issue of Writer’s Digest, E.S. Gaffney says that when she worked for a Department of Energy laboratory, she submitted a proposal to someone with the last name Prono. The spell-checker automatically changed poor Mr. Prono’s name to… you guessed it. Gaffney didn’t notice the mistaken correction and the proposal failed.
More typo tales and prevention tactics:
http://www.yudkin.com/typos.htm
No comments yet.