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A review by aa2q7
The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time by Benjamin D. Herson, Jeff Deck
3.0
I hate to say this, but Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson need an editor (as do we all). I admire the authors of The Great Typo Hunt, a book detailing their cross-country journey to eradicate typos, big and small, but for folks so bent on clarity, I’m not sure why they hadn’t considered conciseness equally important.
In 2008, Deck and Herson, his best friend, formed the Typo Eradication Advancement League (TEAL) and decided to clear up the misspelled clutter of American grammar. The group finds typos, Deck complete with a Typo Correction Kit full of markers and correction fluid, and attempts to correct misspelled signs and misplaced apostrophes. Sometimes, TEAL asks permission, and other times, the missions are covert.
The Great Typo Hunt book was fashioned from Deck and Herson’s blog of a similar name (which hasn’t been updated since March), and I think the stories might’ve held my interest more in small, present-time snippets. My main gripe with the book is the embellished, flowery writing style and excessive use of $10-dollar, GRE vocabulary. For example:
“Alas, before I could picture a pastoral landscape filled with sickeningly bubbly existences under a friendly sun, that destroyer of dreams interfered once again.”
Or:
“For some, the ambivalent nature of apathy rears its fuzzy-logic head.”
Maybe those sentences aren’t so bad now, but reading sentences like that for 200-plus pages actually makes the text less interesting and more complicated.
The real action comes in the last quarter of the book when Deck and Herson are prosecuted for “vandalizing” the Grand Canyon (they corrected a typo on a historical sign). I also enjoyed the broader discussions on how standard English spelling and grammar came to be and how copy editing can facilitate clarity in communication — insights well explained in The Great Typo Hunt. However, this book is more of a memoir of a comical road trip than a grammar classic.
In 2008, Deck and Herson, his best friend, formed the Typo Eradication Advancement League (TEAL) and decided to clear up the misspelled clutter of American grammar. The group finds typos, Deck complete with a Typo Correction Kit full of markers and correction fluid, and attempts to correct misspelled signs and misplaced apostrophes. Sometimes, TEAL asks permission, and other times, the missions are covert.
The Great Typo Hunt book was fashioned from Deck and Herson’s blog of a similar name (which hasn’t been updated since March), and I think the stories might’ve held my interest more in small, present-time snippets. My main gripe with the book is the embellished, flowery writing style and excessive use of $10-dollar, GRE vocabulary. For example:
“Alas, before I could picture a pastoral landscape filled with sickeningly bubbly existences under a friendly sun, that destroyer of dreams interfered once again.”
Or:
“For some, the ambivalent nature of apathy rears its fuzzy-logic head.”
Maybe those sentences aren’t so bad now, but reading sentences like that for 200-plus pages actually makes the text less interesting and more complicated.
The real action comes in the last quarter of the book when Deck and Herson are prosecuted for “vandalizing” the Grand Canyon (they corrected a typo on a historical sign). I also enjoyed the broader discussions on how standard English spelling and grammar came to be and how copy editing can facilitate clarity in communication — insights well explained in The Great Typo Hunt. However, this book is more of a memoir of a comical road trip than a grammar classic.