Recently in the National Geographic Magazine blog David Brindley confessed an embarrassing error in the May issue of National Geographic. In his post, "Slips Happen," he admitted that the thoroughly researched and beautifully mapped story "Arctic Landgrab" contained one ugly error: the misspelling on page 112 of Alaska as Alaksa.
Since the map that contained the egregious error contained only nine words, the misspelling was all the more noticeable.
And in my Sunday Seattle Times this week, I read about the thief who got caught trying to use a forged cashier's check for a shipment of 50 cell phones. How did he slip up? The forged check spelled cashier's as cahier's.
Let's learn from the missteps of proofreaders and thieves–and check everything: proper names, locations, little words, big words, subject lines, headings, headers, footers, paragraphs, bullet points, closings, signature blocks, dates, and even maps and checks.
No doubt, both National Geo and the man "buying" cell phones have learned their lessons!
Lynn
Syntax Training
