Leaving an inedible mark (wait, what?)

Typos happen to everyone. I know this.

(Well, everyone except me, right?)

I also know our brains fill in gaps and swap letters and we read the word we think we wrote.

(But I’m much too careful to do that. Right?)

You know where this is going. I typed something really dumb this week. Short blog post, topic was Black History. And I wrote a sentence that said a particular group of innovators had left an inedible mark.

What. The. Fork.

I’m so embarrassed. There’s a chance I won’t even publish this because . . . what in the actual fork.

An inedible mark? They left a mark that couldn't be eaten?

All of us need editors. The editors need editors. We can be as careful and analytical as can be, but we can’t override our brains. And when we write, we hear what we want, and we see what we want to see. I heard “indelible mark” in my head, and that’s what my brain saw on the screen.

The person who edited the post, a friend, didn’t even call me out on that ridiculousness. She just sent a link of the draft before it published, showing me the edits to get a thumbs-up before it ran. I did a double-take, gasped, and died a little inside.

How did I DO that? (More on that in a minute.)

Although I was mortified, I was also grateful to have had an editor on that one. Imagine how much worse that would have been if it had been published?? I thanked her for the catch and expressed my mortification.

I’m going to obsess over this for good long while. Probably forever. But in the meantime, here are some lessons about how I made my mistake:

• I probably read the copy too fast before submitting. Take your time, friends. Even on something short and sweet and seemingly straightforward.

• Don’t count on spell check. Microsoft Word will typically underline a word it flags as misspelled or grammatically incorrect, but this was neither (inedible is a word!). So I compounded my mistakes here: I did my re-read a little too fast, and I mistook the lack of underlined words on the page for clean copy.

• I did my re-read too soon after writing. Whenever possible, step away from your copy for a while before doing edits. This post was only about 200 words, so I didn’t think much about writing, doing a quick read-through, and sending. Usually, I’m fine. Once in awhile, I'm not. Ahem.

It’s amazing how we see what we want to see on the page. During a recent edit, I asked a writer about a sentence she had written that didn’t seem to make sense. The cause-and-effect didn’t add up. On her first reply, she politely explained what was happening . . . and completely missed what I was asking. I rephrased the question and provided a little more detail about the issue I saw.

And then she saw it too. I love her email back: “OMG, after reading that sentence again for the hundredth time, I see your concern. I was focusing on the wrong part of the sentence, LOL. Thank you for your editor-eye.”

Did you catch that? The snafu wasn’t for lack of effort. She had read the sentence over and over and over. And her brain was so focused on how she phrased the beginning of it that she totally glossed over the way the sentence ended, missing the incongruity.

It happens to everyone.

Even me.

Speaking of edits . . .

The New York Times wrote a story Feb. 1 that tickled my nerdy heart. It was about quarterback Tom Brady, who announced his retirement from the NFL—for the second time. Brady also retired a year ago before changing his mind and playing one more season.

Brady is arguably the best quarterback of all time, and when he announced his retirement last year, it made for all kinds of retrospectives and features and tributes. So everything had kind of been written already when he announced it again.

Enter the venerable NYT. In this piece, the paper re-runs its original retirement story, with a few edits. It’s hilarious and brilliant, and as you scroll, you see Track Changes show up on the screen in live time. Give it a read; even a non-sports fan will appreciate it.

P.S. Subtle burn at the end of that second paragraph? Brady did not, in fact, appear to consult his wife when he reversed last year's decision, nor spend more time with her and the children ... and their divorce took place in October. Ouch.