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Comment by chc | Hacker News Reader

They're called typos. Everybody makes them — even professional writers. In writing that's intended to make money, they're usually caught in editing. If you yourself write without ever producing a typo, that's nice, but it's not really all that important to the craft of writing — much less to owning a business that employs writers.

At any rate, I don't see any reason to expect perfect prose in an informal context like a comment thread. As long as you're understandable, what do you gain from spending more time on nit-picky details?

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Typos are fine, but there is a limit. I read through some of his comments here, and there are enough typos that it makes it fairly annoying to read.

Slow down just a bit and read it over before you post. You'll still make mistakes, but not in every other post.

AKA: Laziness. (Edited to fix spelling pointed out by child comment. Thanks.)

I don't require perfection, just competence. If you don't care enough about your output to make it easily understandable (I don't have to put effort into deciphering your words), why should I care about it?

Ironically, if you'd spell-checked your comment, you would have seen the word you were looking for was "laziness". On the other hand, there's no easy mechanical way of noticing that a small word ("have") was omitted, which is one of the typos for which Zee was being criticized. So what you did is actually lazier than what he did. But I don't look down on you for this typo either. Both your comment and Zee's are pretty easy to understand.

Nobody's perfect. I make mistakes like this all the time, and I'm a professional editor. It's not incompetence — I simply don't have the time to carefully reread, spellcheck and grammar-check everything I write to make sure it's all flawless. And I know many intelligent people who make more mistakes than I do. So when I see somebody get called on a typo, but it's perfectly clear what they were saying in spite of the typo, I find it a bit petty.

It wasn't a typo. It was just a garden-variety spelling error. Thanks for pointing it out. I'll try to remember the correct spelling in the future.

I guess I hold myself to a higher standard than you do. I have old-fashioned ideas. Writers should be competent enough in the fundamentals that even their informal remarks meet a certain standard of composition. When you are a good writer, you put the same level of care into your work regardless of the purpose. Quite frankly, a writer who thinks, "The editor will catch it," doesn't deserve to be paid for the job. It's bad craft.

Unfortunately, in this case, the typos reinforce the idea this person is fundamentally disrespectful. Given that his comments here are part of a PR campaign, he should be taking more care with them in order to make the right impression.

I go by Michele -- with one L. It is my actual middle name. People routinely misspell it with two L's. Sometimes they realize it and apologize for the error. I have found that how someone reacts to being told it is one L says a lot about their character. Decent people are quick to offer sincere apologies. Assholes are quick to use it as a new excuse to piss all over me and make fun of me.

Sure, I agree, there are lots of aspects of his public persona that he could stand to work on. It doesn't make calling out typos less petty or more interesting. The difference between "Person makes harmless typo" and "Person I don't like makes harmless typo" is in your emotions, not in the substance of the comment.

That isn't my point. My point is that when someone is upset with you, attention to such details matter. He appears to not even be trying. It looks very likely that he is either a social nitwit who should appoint someone else to handle his PR or guilty of the degree of disrepect of which he is accused.

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