Some Typos are More Wrong than Others

In Animal Farm, George Orwell quipped, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” For book reviewers, this is true of the animals called typos, and not putting it satirically.

Reviewing books is like driving to a favorite destination; it’s fun but you need to be awake and mindful of everything out there and around to make sure you reach the destination safely and without missing any important signs. And if you see something wrong among the signs, you need to mark them on your mental map.

Typos are just like those signs, little bumps that strike your view during the course of reading. For reviewers, repeated strikes like these mean they need to be considered in assessing the book and its rating. A few of them per chapter are ignorable; having any on every page or even repeating every few pages means the book had a lousy proofreader (if any).

For the former, missing words in a sentence that fail its meaning hit the reviewer hard. A line that reads “His painting all over the place,” with a missing “was”, or “is”, would be such an example. Same for wrong order of numbers; a recent example from my reading experience of a newspaper story being the figure range “4-17” when the article was meant to include the second week dates “7-14.” The effect on reader is stopping for a moment to wonder what the writer really wants to convey.

In comparison, a recent book I read had quite a few typos on just a couple pages in the book. Specifically, they were repetition of the same error – a last name spelled wrong but without making much of a difference in the sound of the word – “Koppel” instead of “Kopple.” This didn’t distract me much. In fact, if the writer hadn’t spelled the first one correctly and then misspelled later, I wouldn’t have been able to catch it at all. The wrong spelling didn’t interfere with my reading experience as such.

As a reviewer, I would see such non-interfering typos less of an influence to put a dent in my assessment of the book than those which throw a wrench in my flow of reading and grasp of meaning. To sum it up, all typos are wrong but some are more bad-looking than others.

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