Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney recently became the butt of many a Twitterverse joke when his new app featured the slogan “A Better Amercia.” Besides advocating for the improvement of a nonexistent country, Romney’s campaign has also been caught advertising their “Offical Gear,” offering a “sneak peak” at a new TV ad, and misspelling Ronald Reagan’s name. One strike can be laughed off, two strikes are highly embarrassing, but three strikes mean someone should have lost their job two strikes ago.
However Romney is not the only one who has struggled with critical typos. There are many examples throughout history of typos that had serious repercussions or were simply seriously embarrassing. When printing a new version of the King James Bible in 1631, the printers left out one little word with a big significance. The typo caused the seventh commandment to read, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” The church back then did not find this mishap as amusing as we may today.
As an events intern here at Castle, I have learned the importance of simple repetition when reading over information. We double check our work… and cross-check, re-check, then double check it again. In the scant two weeks I have worked here, the amount of information that has come across my desk is immense. We have collectively made dozens of corrections, and information needs constant updating when dealing with a large group of event attendees.
In the digital age it’s easy to get lost in all the content that floods our computer screens. It may be tempting to skim through a document or quickly scan an image, but there is something to be said for printing things out, taking a careful, long look at them, and then getting a second set of eyes on them as well.
