Recommended Read
Deck, Jeff and Benjamin D. Herson. The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World One Correction at a Time. New York: Broadway Paperbacks, 2010. [ISBN-13: 978-0-307-59108-1]
So what do you do if you want to change the world and your superpower is a knowledge of grammar? If you’re Jeff Deck, you climb in your car; kit yourself out with chalk, markers, correction fluid, and a cowboy hat; and offer to fix people’s typos from sea to shining sea.
I wondered when I first opened this book if I was going to be following the adventures of a prescriptivist finger wagger trying to regain an imagined golden era of English by chiding and correcting the harried sign makers of the retail world. That didn’t sound like a very fun book to me. So I was happy to find that my fears were unfounded. Luckily Jeff Deck’s editing background means that while he knows his style guides, spelling conventions and grammar rules, he also knows that the these styles and spellings and rules vary from one time and place to another. His goal from the outset is to correct only those errors that are clearly mistakes and leave other variations alone.
Here's a typo I caught and released back into the wild.
So he and a series of stalwart co-correctors travel thousands of kilometres, tracing a circuit around the United States and ultimately finding a total of 437 typos* and correcting 236 of them, some by stealth, some with enthusiastic help, and some while vaguely hostile shopkeepers look on.
