Friday, April 22, 2011

My editor's heart skips beats when I see typos in my tweets

I love to write. I don't profess to be great at it. When I was in grad school, though, I learned that I love to edit, too. From picking out smaller grammatical mistakes, to hammering overly-complex sentences out into something smooth, to the broader goal of shaping a piece in its entirety, the editor's hat was one I found comfortable.

Sadly, so much of what's written these days only gets a cursory glance from an editor. Therefore, the onus on a writer is to be as critical a self-editor as possible. I speak from both sides of the desk.

Errors, when I notice them, bother me. Especially when the errors are mine. One of my biggest gripes with social media tools like Twitter and Facebook is that you can't edit a tweet or wall post after the fact. If you notice an error, you need to post a follow-up tweet/post (inelegant), delete it and tweet/post again (which can be confusing to your followers if several hours or days go by before you catch the mistake), or live with it (too painful for my editor's heart).

All of this to say that, after a string of typos in a few tweets I sent into the ether in the last 24 hours, I feel much better after this tweet:


In reference to the errors in these two tweets: 



So am I nuts, or does anyone else go batty when they notice errors in their social media missives? What do you think best practice is for dealing with them: correcting them as I did above, or just letting it lay if it's a simple typo (and not, say, a broken link)?

1 comment:

cbeck said...

Typos and I go together like two slices of bread go on a sandwich. I used to get regular corrections from kind readers. As long as I don't use "then" instead of "than" and "your/their" instead of "you're/they're", I generally just let it ride.

The most critical response I ever got from a typo was "your the worst at making typos".

If it ever gets really bad, you can just quote the old fake study, which says: "Arocdnicg to rsceearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pcale."