Why Typos are Good
Typos. You can compare them to bedbugs in their resiliency and peskiness. Under the most professional conditions, not only does a manuscript (ideally) get combed for typos by a book’s editor, but the manuscript passes through up to three rounds with a copy-editor. Still, typos slip through the cracks. Take for example, the first printing of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s first hard cover edition of her lipstick feminism screed Bitch. Bruce Springsteen is attributed to having written one of his songs (‘Born in the USA,’ I believe) in 1884. Springsteen is old, as we know, but he wasn’t rallying the troops in the Civil War. Flaubert, in an early English translation, attributed Madame Bovary as having blue eyes once, and brown eyes in another scene.
It is my feeling that typos are inevitable, especially for those who are deeply immersed in the writing process. This is how it happens: the writer is toiling away, concentrating on the process of expression, confident in their words, faithfully translating their ideas onto the page. Upon re-reading, if the have done a good job, they will be close enough to the text that they will not be reading it with their eyes, they will be re-creating the writing in their imagination. In a sense, the letters themselves are illusory. They literally won’t see the typo, because what they are reading is conforming with the mental blueprint they have already worked from. A detached reader will not be working from this blueprint, and will spot a typos with much more ease than the writer themselves.
Somewhere in between is the editor. A good developmental editor, who is really working in the deep tissue of the narrative and language of a story is going to be reading the book as a surrogate author, and, if they are close enough to the text, will anticipate the author’s voice. The bad news is they might just as well, through a trick of a mind, skip right over a typo. Most editors are actually not great proof-readers, and anybody in publishing will tell you that editing (structure, theme, language, and pacing) and copy editing (the nuts and bolts of punctuation and grammar) are vastly different talents. Very few people do both well. Proof-readers can make their way through an entire body of work without actually having engaged their imagination; they are simply zapping typos and mistakes with laser-sharp eyes. The farther removed they are from the text and topic the better.
But – and I almost certain I am alone on this – there is something pleasingly human about a typo, like the squeak of a finger moved hastily down a guitar string, or a mole on an otherwise flawless face. It takes the author – hidden and almost deified through print – down to a human level. And human connections are why I, for one, read.