I apologize, sincerely and completely, to everyone who has read this blog. Every last one of you deserves a medal for slogging through the forest of typos that result from my vague attempts at communication in English. (If I stuck to my native Gibberish I'd probably be just fine.)
Typos are my bane. There are probably still a few in this post that I haven't found. Yet.
Let me tell you a story...
An hour ago I exchanged email with a friend (hi Steve!) and former coworker - a technical writer - with whom I hadn't conversed in a long time. It turns out he has a blog. Naturally I read through some of his blog in the process of this communication. His writing is good. I've added his blog to my RSS reader.
With some trepidation I told him that I, too, kept a blog. A few minutes later he told me that he'd added my blog to his RSS tool. (The main attraction being the picture of me with a fork suspended from my nose.) Uh-oh. Now Steve's a nice guy, but look at it from my point of view: I've got a professional writer reading my blog. This'll be "interesting". I'd better go look at it real quick. From the outside.
And the first thing I noted was that I hadn't posted in 12 days. Even without Steve there as a motivator, that was not good, and I needed to remedy that. The previous - basically content free - post was the result. OK, fine. At least you know I'm still alive.
Then I went back and re-read the post I'd just written and published. Typos. Typo city! And Steve is out there lurking. He really is a nice guy, and I probably won't get email telling me that I have used "it's" where I meant "its" for the 10,000th time. But I could get that email. If not from him then from a few others that have been known to "express themselves" to me in the past. (Hi David.)
So I edited the post and fixed the typos I could find, including the gross spelling errors that spell check was warning me about when I typed the thing up in the first place. sigh.
Then I checked a few of the older posts, just to see how I'd been doing on the typo front.
Suffice it to say that if this was a war between me and the typos, they'd overrun my position years ago, taken my HQ, sacked my supply houses, moved in, married, had kids, and sent them to college. There were a LOT of typos out there.
So I fixed what I found in various older posts. I didn't get to them all, alas, and I probably missed some in the posts I did review. What can I say, though. I don't have hours and hours to spend at it right now, and finding my own typos is just about as easy as performing brain surgery on myself.
But once again I must apologize to all of you who risk reading my words. I'm not nearly as illiterate as they make me look. Honestly! Please accept this blog entry - even if it too is crawling with grammatical boo-boos - in the spirit of contrition in which it is intended.
Special thanks to Steve for causing this, even if it was entirely unintentional on his part. If you want a link to your blog in here, Steve, just ask.
I guess there was one benefit to finding all those typos: I got to add another post to my "Things I Hate" series.
(Now to proofread this before hitting the "publish post" button... shudder.)
