The Sin of Typos and Grammatical Mistakes

Last year I wrote a post – ‘Annoying Errors That Do Not Really Matter (But Somehow Do)’ – about the number of typos I found in a book. In the post I noted:

...it must be admitted that these mistakes are very small and none of them were crucial in terms of understanding the main objective of each chapter. I’m also fully admitting that picking up on such errors and dedicating a post to them is incredibly pedantic. But no matter the insignificance and pettiness, the fact remains: these errors annoy me.

I then attempted to explain the reasons why these errors annoyed me:

A small error suggests that larger errors could reside within the writing of the chapter. I obviously picked up on these errors because of my previous reading of British history, but I am not as well versed in American history. Therefore, my confidence in taking on board the arguments and points is not as high as it perhaps should be. Furthermore, these small errors are so small that they could have been remedied with a simple check of the facts online: that they have not been corrected suggests a more sloppy(ish) approach. Ultimately, I’m left asking myself: are the authors really in charge of the facts available to them?

On reading through the post (with my 2021 eyes) I remain fixed on this position; although, it must be said, I would substitute the word ‘charge’ in the final sentence to ‘command’ or ‘control’. Furthermore, I also added in the next paragraph how typos are inevitable, and that as long as a page was not riddled with such mistakes then an error here or there was forgiveable.

I concluded this post with the following paragraph:

However, I must add that I did enjoy the book: it was terrible by any means. And my final realisation of this post is that I now open myself up to such accusations of being sloppy with my own posts. Which is why I may use some of the summer break in re-visiting my posts to double-check!

But I did not re-visit posts in an attempt to clean them up, not until recently on re-reading a few others (of the hundreds on the site) when I became annoyed at my very own writing: typos and grammatical mistakes were found in all corners, it seemed! Of course, a blog is a different publishing process than an academic text, in that it is more reflective and more spontaneous, however, such mistakes have motivated me to go through each and every post in order to update and remove such sloppy errors. I’m thinking this as more of a spring clean of the blog, and after three years of writing it is about time this was attempted. Perhaps then I can achieve absolution for my sins.