I got an email from my beloved Alamo Drafthouse movie theater. A new location was about to open, right in my neighborhood. Hooray! Right after that email, I received this emergency follow-up:

Just as an update, the $5 tickets was a miscommunication and we will be charging FULL PRICE tickets for Soft Opening except on $5 Tuesday. We apologize for the type and lets push forward!

Un-hooray. But I had to laugh: just one typo in the message, but dang — what an exquisite typo. They misspelled typo.

It’s bound to happen when you rush out a correction, and it’s double-painful. So, Alamo, want some tips to help you mind your p’s and q’s?

Minding your p’s and q’s

That catchy phrase makes sense. Lowercase p and q look a lot alike. But the cliché originated in letterpress days where it was especially appropriate. When setting blocks of type, a printer has to remember that all his letters are backwards. If it looks like a p on the block, it’ll be a q when it gets printed to paper.

Ooo-ooo-oooo! And let me digress some more! Letterpress days also gave us the description uppercase and lowercase. Capital letters were generally kept in the top drawer — called a case — while the matching lowercase letters were kept in a lower case.

So cliché

Did I say cliché? That word has printing roots too, although it’s a long walk. When a big block of type was to be used often, printers would save time by setting the whole thing in a single metal casting. Then they could release all those individual letters for other jobs. This was called stereotyping, and you were sure to get predictable, cookie-cutter results. While most of Europe used this technique for full pages of text, the French experimented with using smaller blocks of repetitive or useful phrases. They called these clichés, which literally means click, because a typesetter could just click the phrase into place without having to redo all the individual letters.

Oh yeah. Typos.

That’s where I started with this, huh. I promised to give you some tips to catch all your typos so I don’t spot them and make fun of you.

It’s just that I love a good typo. To prove I’m not just being arrogant, I’ll share with you my most impressive goof. Years ago I released an album of 13 original songs, titled Used Without Permission. It had been out for two weeks before a friend called to tease me that I had spelled my own name wrong on the album cover. Besides being a musician and a graphic designer, I’m a professional proofreader. I know how to spell my name, so I just called him a liar.

Then I looked. There it was. It was such an exquisite mistake that I decided to leave it. (You can go look. It’s still there.) Oddly, not one person has noticed it since.

Oh yeah. Typos!

So here are my suggestions (finally) to help you catch more typos:

• Use your spell-checker first. One in four manuscripts I proofread have mistakes an automated checker would have caught. Spell-check doesn’t get everything right, but it can tease most typos out in an easy flash round, leaving you more brain energy to catch the trickier stuff.
• Don’t proof your own work. You know what the words are supposed to say, and your brain will help out by subconsciously fixing misspelled words. Like your own name.
• Read in incandescent or LED light. Flourescent light has a very slow flicker rate, which wears out your eyes faster. That’s why everyone in your office is happiest sitting by the window.
• Follow with your finger. Or use a ruler guide. I’m a little dyslexic, so my eyes have to really focus. But you more perfect mortals tend to read in chunky blocks. Your marvelous brain processes all that data in a Gestalt kind of way that forgives errors. A pointer keeps your focus on a smaller spot.
• Read aloud. It slows down your brain and keeps you from scanning.
• Proof backwards, or from the bottom up. This won’t catch grammar errors, but it’s a great way to keep your brain from auto-correcting, by forcing you see each word individually.
• Put it to paper. Nobody knows why. Editing on screen is convenient, but people are far more effective when proofing from a real live sheet of paper.
• Knock it off after 40 minutes. Proofing is terrible on your eyes as well as your brain. After every half hour, give yourself a break for ten minutes or so. Focus on something distant, preferably something moving, like traffic or that protest across the street. This resets and stretches your eyes back to a more natural state. Cave men didn’t proofread.
• Sleep on it. This is the best way to catch clumsy or unclear sentences. Things make sense when you know what you meant. Come back later and you’ll find yourself saying, “Wait — what?”
• Publish it. Nothing makes a typo jump out at you like seeing it in the final product.

Follow this advice, and if you’re careful, and prepared, and skilled, and don’t have any typos, you’ll make a good impression.

Yep, that’s another phrase from the printing industry.

[ Happy sigh. ]