A poem of mine that recently appeared in an online journal contained a rather glaring typo—for some reason the editors misspelled my name in both the table of contents and on the page where the piece appeared. Oddly enough, my name was spelled correctly in the accompanying bio. I went back and checked all the documents I had submitted through their submission system, as well as an electronic contract that they had asked me to fill out and sign. My name was spelled correctly on everything.
I
have had several pieces published both on-line and in print over the years that
contained typos, but this seems to be occurring with increasing frequency of
late. In a couple of cases, I actually submitted something with a typo in it
and it was accepted without the editor noticing the typo before it was
published. On another occasion, I discovered a typo in the original manuscript
after it was submitted and accepted. I notified the editor who was working on
the piece, and she thanked me for bringing it to her attention and assured me that
it would be corrected before publication. It wasn’t.
Recently,
what I have found to be even more common are typos introduced by the editors themselves
during editing (things like substituting a homophone for a word that I used
properly, changing punctuation or italics but not taking out the original ones,
improper capitalization or removal of diacritics [especially in Spanish
phrases], and simply leaving out a word or line). Typos in a piece of writing
are hardly something to get upset about, considering the many other things that
I deal with in daily life, and especially bearing in mind the state of the
world at large. As my mother used to say, “What does it matter in the light of
eternity?” I only wish to comment on the proliferation of typos in published
work (especially on-line) in the hope that editors might be more aware of it—not
to say that most aren’t already aware—and to consider always taking the extra
step of giving contributors an opportunity to proofread their work before it is
published. This isn’t a perfect solution, but it is a good tool to catch those
minor errors that can slip past a busy editor’s eyes, especially things like
having one’s name misspelled.
(Update: After a little back and forth with the editors, the misspelling of my name that originally occasioned this post was eventually—and fully—corrected by them, which I am sincerely grateful for.)