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sevenlefts 's review for:
A witty book about two guys travelling the United States (more accurately, the edges of the continental portions of it), seeking out typos and trying, more or less successfully, to correct them. A great premise, but I sort of felt like the idea of the trip, the accompanying blog, and indeed even this book, seemed a bit gimmicky. It's presented as a passionate crusade, but it felt more like a guy looking for something to do and finding a fun way to do it. I can't fault anyone for that; it sounds like it was a lot of fun and an eye-opening experience. But it felt like the editing aspects of the story were an excuse to make a long road trip.
The writing is funny, and thoughtful, and throughout there is a lot of navel-gazing about the causes of typos (laziness? poor education? hypercorrection?) and what drives a person to want to correct them. There are discussions about prescriptive and descriptive approaches to English, and observations about peoples reactions to being confronted with their own typos. And, ultimately, their typo correction efforts result in the U.S. government literally making a federal case about their
activities.
A section toward the end about Direct Instruction as a panacea for ridding the world of typos and improving editing practice seemed a bit displaced and out of joint with the rest of the book. I did like the taxonomy of typos in the appendix, and how they were divided into different genera: apostrophe errors, misspellings, agreement errors, etc.
I just hope that after reading this book typos don't start to annoy me even more than they currently do. Also, I'll be waiting for someone to point out a typo in this review. I'm sure they're in here somewhere...
The writing is funny, and thoughtful, and throughout there is a lot of navel-gazing about the causes of typos (laziness? poor education? hypercorrection?) and what drives a person to want to correct them. There are discussions about prescriptive and descriptive approaches to English, and observations about peoples reactions to being confronted with their own typos. And, ultimately, their typo correction efforts result in the U.S. government literally making a federal case about their
activities.
A section toward the end about Direct Instruction as a panacea for ridding the world of typos and improving editing practice seemed a bit displaced and out of joint with the rest of the book. I did like the taxonomy of typos in the appendix, and how they were divided into different genera: apostrophe errors, misspellings, agreement errors, etc.
I just hope that after reading this book typos don't start to annoy me even more than they currently do. Also, I'll be waiting for someone to point out a typo in this review. I'm sure they're in here somewhere...