And what the communications community needs to do to avoid embarrassing mistakes.

Teachable moment.

That’s the candy-coated term used to politely describe a massive screw-up – a complete and unmitigated disaster.

My teachable moment came when I was just 24 years old, fresh out of journalism school, working as a reporter for a rural Alberta weekly newspaper. The great thing about starting at a weekly newspaper was you got to cut your teeth in every department. No matter what the topic was, regardless of how much or how little you knew about it, you were the one who had to write about it.

I had no experience covering healthcare but, as the only reporter on staff, I was assigned to find out if a healthcare crisis was emerging in the area. People were on high alert because Hantavirus outbreaks had been reported in some of the neighbouring towns.

As stories go, this wasn’t exactly Watergate. It was reasonably straightforward. There had been several people who went into the ER over the weekend with severe flu-like symptoms. Health officials tested, but the test results could not confirm the presence of Hantavirus. So that’s how I wrote it in the story, “health officials could not confirm the presence of Hantavirus.”

Our paper had its own printing press in the back room, so one of the most satisfying parts of my work week was hearing the hum of the papers rolling off the press. I was green enough to still get a little thrill from seeing my byline in the newspaper, so often I would grab a copy, literally hot off the presses, and flip through it.

And that’s when I saw it.

That healthcare story which I proofed again and again and again, contained a small but important typo. The sentence “health officials could not confirm the presence of hantavirus” was missing the word not.

The print run was nearly done; it was too late to fix it. In most workplaces, the worst thing that results from a typo is a stern talking to from your boss. Here, I’ve just erroneously told tens of thousands of Central Albertans that their community is suffering from a Hantavirus outbreak.

Fortunately, my editor was very calm and gracious with me. She told me to call the local hospital and give them a heads-up about what was about to come out in that week’s paper.

As I was on hold, waiting for someone to pick up on the other end, I had two thoughts. First, this feels a lot like that scene in Dr. Strangelove when the President must call his Soviet counterpart to explain that a rogue commander is about to attack his country. “This is just a friendly call to let you know that something terrible has happened.” As it turned out, the hospital staff appreciated the call and took proactive steps to put notices all around the hospital to alert people to the error in the newspaper.

But the second thought is one that has stuck with me for years. How did it happen? I re-read that story several times, and every time I saw the word “not” in that sentence. How did I miss it all those times, and yet it jumped right off the page the moment I saw it in print? The answer lies in a phenomenon of the brain known as skipping.

Skipping and Typoglycemia

Skipping is the brain’s way of autocorrecting on the fly as we process written content. It can take the the form of ignoring a duplicate word, as in the case of this very sentence. Or, as was my experience, it can fill in a missing word that the brain believes was mistakenly left out.

A 2011 study by Ranier et al. found that there were two critical factors that contributed to the likelihood of skipping: (1) the length of the word and (2) the predictability of the word. In essence, the shorter and more predictable the word is in the context of the sentence, the higher the probability the brain will activate skipping. In my case, the missing word “not” was very short and highly predictable, given that I wrote the sentence, so I knew it was supposed to be there.

A similar neurological phenomenon was highlighted in a popular meme. “Typoglycemia” is the tongue-in-cheek term coined to describe the brain’s ability to read and process scrambled words as long as the first and last letters remain intact.

Here is the meme:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Skipping and “typoglycemia” are both tricks of the brain to help us take in information as we read. They’re ways of “chunking” information to help us process the content faster. And while this may be helpful to us as readers, it’s also what creates blind spots when it comes to finding typos in our writing.

What this means for Communications best practices

It’s been nearly three decades since my typographical “oopsie,” and to this day, I am reminded of it every time I see a public-facing corporate communications piece with a typo, missing word, or “their” instead of “they’re.” These are the slightest of mistakes easily made by even the most experienced content creators, and yet, just one leaps out as a huge black eye on the organization. Fairly or unfairly, your credibility as a leader in the communications field is undercut by these tiny mistakes.

So, what can be done to avoid them? Knowing what we do about skipping and other neuroscience phenomena, here are some best practices to eliminate typos in your written pieces.

Never rely on the author to proofread their own material

“Why didn’t you proofread this more carefully?” This is usually what the writer gets when a typo is found in their work. But just as I discovered the hard way, the writer cannot proofread their own material. The fact that the writer knows what is supposed to be there increases the predictability factor that leads to skipping.

Project managers should ensure someone outside the immediate sphere of the work is assigned to proofread the material. As an additional best practice, start with the last sentence and move up from there. This will eliminate the possibility of getting caught up in the content and missing an error.

Always proof from a printed copy

Ask just about any experienced editor, and they’ll tell you that they prefer to proof from a hard copy. Jessica Maile is a production editor at Dublin Gazette Group in Dublin, Ireland. She relies on print for quality control. “I’m the last to see news pages before they go to print, and I prefer hard copies,” she says. “Something just clicks in my head that this tangible copy is the final final copy, and I catch way more problems than when editing onscreen.”

Proofreading from a printed copy makes it easier to catch errors than proofing from a screen. This is why I caught my mistake the first time I read it in print. This principle holds true for any printed document. It’s why Missouri playwright Kenneth Lee prints out all his plays to proofread before sending it out into the world.

“I never send something to a publisher until I have read the document out loud from a printed copy and had someone I trust look at it with a fresh eye,” Lee says. “Normally, I will find something that I missed onscreen.”

Proof smarter, not harder

Like it or not, proofreading is one of the many things AI can do better than humans. Even after you’ve had a second set of eyes on it and feel it’s ready for prime time, I recommend running it through a program like Grammarly. Grammarly is excellent at picking up typos and has the bonus feature of recommending sentence rewrites to make your writing tighter and clearer.

As communications professionals, we are held to an incredibly high standard, and rightfully so. We simply cannot afford to have our material littered with typos and missing words. By employing these proofreading best practices, you can hopefully spare yourself the dreaded “teachable moment.”