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Love thy typos...
On the Craft

Love thy typos...

It never ends, does it?

Fernando Sdrigotti's avatar
Fernando Sdrigotti
Feb 04, 2025
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Love thy typos...
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There is no such thing as a prefect copy

Ok, that typo was intentional, but this doesn’t make the statement less true. There’s no such thing as a perfect copy — now without a typo — and the earlier you come to terms with this, the better. I’ve been churning out words for the past thirty years, and have been regularly submitting them to publishers, magazines, and journals for about twenty, and I don’t think I’ve ever managed to send a piece that didn’t require corrections. There are always turns of phrase that could have been polished, there’s always a section with clunky grammar, but I’m not talking about that. What I mean is that there are always nagging little shitstains on the text — typos, that is. The fact that they are such insignificant anomalies makes it worse, as awkward phrasing and colossal fuckups can always pass as intentionally avant-garde.

Imagine the Buzz Lightyear meme, but he says “TYPOS. TYPOS EVERYWHERE”. Because there are typos in every single piece I’ve published. There are typos in all my stories living in magazines. There are typos in all of my books. There are typos in the few academic articles I bothered publishing. And to my dismay, there’s an obvious typo in THE OPENING SENTENCE of my PhD thesis — an atrocity I discovered when I laid eyes on it during my viva. There will be typos in my next book, no matter how many times I read the whole manuscript aloud, and it should go without saying that there will be typos in this piece. True, I’m writing in English and am more likely to stumble in the lingo of the Bard than in my own, but this isn’t a language problem. Typos will always be there, even if I start writing with hieroglyphics. In a way, they are the one thing I can be sure of in my work.

Prefection as the prefect excuse — Hugo and Archibald

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