It looks like that New Year’s resolution to proofread everyting twice isn’t going so well. Here’s more proof.
Earlier today marketing guru Seth Godin pointed to a young graduate looking for a job who gave up boring resumes and built a web site. The kid’s got moxy.
But he doesn’t proofread. The short and snappy text on the homepage included the highlighted line: “I’m ready to something remarkable with you.”
Notice something missing? It’s like “All your base are belong to us,” only there’s not a funny story about mistranslation.
But let’s cut the aspiring marketer, Jeff Clark, some slack. When I went back to the site mere hours later to post about it, he’d already corrected the goof (hence the screenshot). His site is a pretty brilliant idea to showcase his work and his talent. Heck, he got Seth Godin to talk about him. Clark isn’t just looking for a job. With his resume, he should have a job already. He’s looking for the “best advertising gig out there,” and you don’t get that by doing the same boring resume everybody else does. Way to go, Jeff Clark. Hope you find that gig.
But all the gutsy ideas, all the impressive design, all the incredible traffic can come crashing down when you have a typo in the middle of it all. Remember that the next time you print a bulletin, publish a web site, order a banner, create a slide. Proof it. And then have someone else proof it.
Brandon Meek
February 22, 2006
The guy testifying was actually a shot of his former boss screaming in agony over the typo that went out to 30 million homes across the U.S.
Dan
February 22, 2006
That’s a thing with blogs that I’m not yet used to — proofreading. You never know who may be reading your stuff.
Jonathan Acuff
February 23, 2006
I wanted to piggyback on your entry by saying that for me, a typo tends to nullify everything else that comes after it. For example, I once purchased a book about how to manage your time and get lots of things done everyday. It was an admittedly foolish purchase, basically indicating that I thought a band-aid of a book would patch up the neck wound of a pace I was keeping in my life, but that’s not the point. In the forward of the book, the author wrote “I’ve worked as a “management consultant” for the last two decases …”
I’m pretty forgiving when it comes to the rules of grammar because it takes a mathematical side of the brain that’s completely different than the creative side. I also think that to communicate you have to know when and why to bend the rules. Whenever a client tells me “you wrote some incomplete sentences in our ad” I tell them thank you. One of the best written ads, in my opinion, in the last 5 years was the billboard for Range Rover. All it said was “Not a, the.” In three words, only 12 characters, they communicated their entire brand promise. Brilliant. Long live the fragment, but a typo is a deal breaker.
When I saw the typo in the forward of the time management book I instantly thought “wow, how can I trust this guy’s time management advice if he didn’t even leave enough time in the publishing process to have a proofreader scrub his book?”
Typos hurt.
janna
February 23, 2006
kinda reminds me of the UCC “typo”…hopefully this guy doesn’t get offended because we didn’t tell him first…ha ha
Kevin D. Hendricks
February 23, 2006
I would say the medium determines a lot of the impact of a typo. While I don’t like typos in blogs, they’re a little more accepted than say, a typo in a book. Blogs are meant to be a faster form of media and a typo here or there shows that you’re only human (or so argues Robert Scoble in his new book Naked Conversations).
But in most cases a typo only hurts.
stu McGregor
February 26, 2006
i was taking the typo high ground until i saw the data projected welcome message i had prepared for church on sunday night. it was 10 minutes before i noticed the mistake and corrected it…dear oh dear…