Take a second look before posting

Today's edition of "everyone needs a copyeditor" features this large headline in the Denver Post: "Voodoo Doughnut coming to Denver International Airport in 2020."

I know. We can all make the quick correction to 2021 in our heads, and we can all sympathize with writers everywhere who make an error or miss a typo. 

These errors happen in headlines more often that you would imagine. My theory is that the people creating pages have a default that larger type MUST be right. Sort of a "can't see the forest for the trees" situation.

Many errors are due to the disconnect between how fast we can think and how fast we can type. Most researchers have found that, although strictly speaking we don't seem to think in "words," our average speed of thought comes out to about 400 words per minute. 

That is so great for conversations, where we can devote one portion of our 400 words to listening and another portion to analysis and even formulating a response or a follow up question. Of course, even in a conversation we can foul things up, missing a key point or word as we prepare for our clever riposte.

Really fast typists can hit 100 words per minute, but they are rare, and most people tend to compose at the keyboard. I have no solid research on this but I would guess that most of us TYPE about 20-30 words per minute.

That leaves a LOT of potential activity in our brains and we hate to waste all that capacity, so our minds continue working even as our fingers are clacking away on the keyboard. Is it any wonder that we sometimes glance at the screen and wonder how that particular combination of letters, words and phrases actually showed up there?

"Hey! Give me a break. I was THINKING."

On a related note, did you know that reading speed appears to SLOW with more education? It seems crazy, but a high school sophomore usually reads faster than a college student, and graduate students read slower than undergrads. The theory is that this is due to a person with more education bringing more to the experience of reading, connecting with other books or articles, looking for deeper meaning, etc. This doesn't mean those with less education are not as smart, but that the more context we bring to our reading the more likely we are to slow down.

You can imagine how this all conspires to make it MORE likely that the faster you are thinking and the more you are bringing to the process pf writing, which involves typing or handwriting, the more likely mistakes are.

At least in first drafts.

One of my favorite writing teachers would say, "Lower the bar on your first draft." Then he followed with "All writing is rewriting."

Get something on the screen so you can work with some ideas and some specific language.

But anyone who settles for posting that first draft is gambling with their credibility, and the odds are not good.

Every time a reader sees an obvious mistake like the one in the Post headline, the credibility of the publication drops a bit. After all, how many other errors are in the smaller type?