The elegance of typos
There’s an accidental poetry that writes itself the moment your attention wanders, says Paige Nick
Penicillin, Post-it Notes, Teflon, cornflakes. All invented by accident. There have been unimportant things invented by accident too, like the slinky, silly putty and popsicles. For me, some typos also fall into the category of important accidents. I’ve been writing professionally for almost 30 years, and I still couldn’t come up with anything as profound as some typos.
There are whole websites dedicated to Autocorrect Poetry, that beautiful accidental tacking together of the wrong words, resulting in finger-slip sonnets, handbag haikus and pocket prose.
It falls in the same category as what I like to think of as “people who don’t speak English speak it the best”. There’s something magical about the kind of syntax created by people who don’t have access to all the right words in all the right orders. I once overheard a foreigner who was window shopping explaining to a friend in broken English that she was going to “shop with her eyes”.
And so often autocorrect does us a favour, making otherwise dull sentences more poetic, giving new meaning to soaping lists. “Buy beard” is more entertaining than “buy bread” every day of the week.
Sure, typos aren’t always that elegant. Like when they’re/their/there illustrating ignorance. But even then, maybe they’re/their/there doing us a favour — helping us manage expectations of the sender’s capabilities.
Then again, you can’t always blame a typo on the typist. For one there’s dyslexia, commonly thrust on some of the smartest people you’ll ever meet. There’s also our brains we have to contend with. You can re-read your own writing a gazillion times and you may still never pick up all the errors. Not because you’re dim. Well, maybe because you’re/your/yore dim, but also because you wrote it, which means you’re familiar with the landscape of your own words. There’s a perfectly correct version of it living somewhere in your brain and that version competes with the IRL version on the page. Our remarkable brains fill in what’s missing or
incorrect, and tell us it’s right. It’s a case of not being able to see the words for the trees.
Psychologist Tom Stafford, who studies typos at the University of
Sheffield, says to catch the errors of your ways, you have to make your work as unfamiliar as possible. Some writers change the font or the colour of the type before they go in with a red pen. Others print it out, then edit by hand. Another great writer I know reads her manuscripts out loud.
A famous copywriter once told me to read my work backwards. Anything you can do to change how your writing looks will help make it less familiar to your brain when you’re doing final checks/cheques/Czechs.
Even the pros are known to miss their own typos. You can catch them in just about every newspaper, even the New York Times, and they hire people whose/who’s only job is to line edit. The Bible has at least one. A blogger in Canada picked up a missing apostrophe. So even the guy who invented language (and errors) couldn’t pick up His own mistakes.
Content marketing specialist Shira Stieglitz ran A/B tests on Google ads and landing pages and discovered that typos and grammatical errors ultimately cost you 12% more. Ads with typos get 70% fewer clicks. After all, we’re hardwired to mistrust anything with an error in it.
Would you rather hire a plumber who wants to fix your pipes or fist your pipes?
Fewer clicks result in higher per-click costs, and gets your listing lowered in the search ranks too/two/to. And typos on landing pages reduce the time people spend on your page by 8%.
Further proof came in the tests they ran in countries where people don’t speak English as a first language, where the typos made very little difference to the click through/threw rates.
Interestingly, some smart companies even go as far as to buy common search words as well as their company name or some of their products in their popularly misspelt forms, so that they don’t lose out on any incorrect searches. So if you search for Coka Cola, you might still get where you’re wanting to go.
That’s typos for you, sometimes good, sometimes bad, often poetick/poëtic. Unless you’re the team behind the Marin 1 Space Probe, which crashed due to a misplaced hyphen, and famously became one of the most expensive typos ever.
‘Buy beard’ is more entertaining than ‘buy bread’ every day of the week