The 'Ugh' of Typos - Lift Internal

We’ve all been there.

You’re launching a complex campaign or hosting an event. It doesn’t matter if it’s internal to your organization or public. The experience is the same. There are hundreds of moving parts and you need to keep track of them, quickly getting any that are going awry back in line.

Chances are that among the mountain of content generated for promotion, registration, inspiration, management, safety and recognition most of it will not be online, the only easily corrected medium. Once you’re printed those brochures, it’s pretty tough to change them. Send out a press release and it’s as good as written in stone. Imprint event details on giveaways such as T-shirts and as soon as they are handed to volunteers and/or participants, you’re committed.

Then…

I don’t know of one communicator who hasn’t that moment of ‘ugh’ when they realize there’s been an irreversible typo on their watch. We’re human. It happens.

Now, in case you’re one of the lucky few who have never had that experience, let me tell you it’s not fun. There’s usually a genuine physical reaction that accompanies that moment of truth. It manifests differently for everyone but for me, my chest is flooded with what I figure is adrenaline and I develop a sour taste in my mouth. At the beginning of my career, a situation like that would derail me for the rest of day. Thankfully, as I gained experience, typos became fewer and further between and I learned to recover rapidly when they did happen.

The scars remain

When I read this story about a typo on T-shirts worn by participants in a cycling event in South Africa, I uttered an empathetic ‘ugh’ and I felt anxious by proxy. It’s bad enough to let a mistake like that go through. Add to it world-wide exposure because it involved the most significant word in a quote from Nelson Mandela and, well, that’s a bad day for those involved.

There are no words I can offer to make the people responsible for the T-shirts feel better about this situation. All I can say is that, if we allow ourselves to learn, these moments make us better and stronger communicators.

Invest the time for prevention

For all of us, this story is a good reminder of three basics of proofreading:

Read text backwards. This eliminates expectancy reading (skipping over words and letters based on assumptions), which is how we normally read.
Check days, dates and times against an actual calendar and statistics and quotes with original sources.
If you wrote it, don’t be the last to proofread it.

May you have a typo-free day!