Few things bring people together online like a typo.
A writer's brain is working faster than their fingers, and they type "your" instead of "you're." Autocorrect turns you-know-what into "duck." Or someone's fat fingers accidentally send out "form" instead of "from," or, even better, "pubic" instead of "public."
It's time we embrace these minor errors. They're actually a good thing... and I'm not just saying this because I'm often guilty of making them. Hear me out.
I'm going to start by letting you hop into bed with me for a few minutes. I have a good friend who tells me she never remembers her dreams, and that's always shocked me because I have extremely vivid ones that can haunt me for days. According to neuroscientist Raphael Vallat, "Dreamers tend to be more anxious, but they’re also more open to experiences and more creative people."
"The analogy I make is that dreamers are the artists, whereas nondreamers are the engineers," he added.
That makes sense to me. I don't know that I'd call myself an artist, but I am, by nature, a storyteller and have been all my life. And I think that's why, more often than not in recent weeks, I dream about Cuba. It's kind of annoying to be honest. I'd much rather be dreaming about some hot guy or some beautiful beach than Raúl Castro and Miguel Díaz-Canel. It was the same back in the fall when I was writing about Venezuela almost daily. I can't tell you how many nights Marco Rubio and I went to Caracas to negotiate with Nicolás Maduro in my sleep.
Last night, my brain gave me a little bit of a break from geopolitics, or so I thought. I dreamed I was having a garage sale, but suddenly, Condoleezza Rice showed up. Go figure.
Anyway, my point in telling you this is that I am usually pretty passionate about what I write — so much so that it haunts my dreams. Sometimes, I get so excited to get to my computer and share a new story with you that my brain does work faster than my fingers. I care about some of these things so deeply that the substance takes top priority.
That's not to say that spelling and grammar aren't a priority. I read over everything before I submit it. An editor usually reads over it before it's published.
Even so, that type of writing will always be a little messy. In my case, some of my Latin American deep dives are so exhausting and exhilarating for me that I'm left feeling so mentally and physically worn out by the time I'm finished with one that, yes, I am going to miss a minor mistake. In our editors' defense, they go through dozens of articles every day while multitasking the other parts of their jobs, so, yes, they're going to miss things too.
As a reader myself, I'm grateful when I can tell that the writer pours her heart and soul into something. That's truer today than it ever has been, as AI writing has taken over so much of our daily content. I see it in blog posts and on social media captions. Heck, I can't receive a text or private message from someone without AI trying to tell me how to respond. Sadly, I can even detect AI writing across the media these days.
I won't mince words. I hate it. I don't want to read stories written by a computer, whether it's a fun beach read novel or a deep dive news article about the Venezuelan regime. I want to know there's a human on the other end. I want unique voices and rhythms. I want quirks. And yes, I want the occasional typo.
There's not a single human on the planet who hasn't made one. I've seen them in the fanciest of columns written by the most educated among us. I've seen them in books published by some of the biggest companies in the world. There have been Bibles printed with typos, and even before printing, scribes made such mistakes. Even the president makes them. We all remember "covfefe."
Some of them are admittedly embarrassing. Some are hilarious. Earlier today, I saw a guy on X talking about how more Christians need to "embrace Chris." He was missing a "t" at the end there. At some point in the last week, I wrote about an "uninhibited island." I meant "uninhabited," of course, but y'all had a field day with that one.
Admittedly, when I first started writing for an audience, I would get somewhat upset when someone mocked me for a typo. It can be quite disheartening to spend five hours researching something important yet underreported, like, I don't know, China taking over ports in Latin America, only to look at the comments section and see that most people were more interested in pointing out a misspelled word than the actual meat of the story itself.
It doesn't bother me anymore. I just laugh at it, even if some of y'all take it a little too seriously. Several months ago, I wrote something about the Civil War. The article had like 11 dates in it, and for one of them, I'd accidentally hit a nine instead of a six or something like that. I swear, I received no less than 30 nasty emails, either mocking me or telling me I had no business writing about history if I couldn't even get the dates right. Never mind the fact that the other 10 dates were correct and that one was obviously a typo. Those of you who fall into that category need to go outside and touch grass. Get some fresh air. I said what I said.
The fact of the matter is that the day we stop seeing typos in our books and articles is the day we've lost the art of writing. It's the day we trade our creative, imperfect, beautiful human brains for the cold, lifeless perception of perfection of a computer, and that's a day I never want to see in my lifetime.
It's definitely not something you'll ever see from me. I tend to write conversationally anyway, and conversation is imperfect. I'd rather my articles sound like we're just old friends sitting on the front porch, sipping sweet tea and catching up on the fall of communist countries than an encyclopedia entry. Though a few weeks ago, someone actually emailed me and told me I needed to start trying to sound more like an encyclopedia and stop using so much informal phrasing. I just laughed at that too. I've made a living writing for over 15 years now, so I think I'll just keep doing what I'm doing.
But the day there are no typos in my work will be the day I stop breathing. Even if y'all are going to mock me for it from time to time, integrity is far more important to me than ego.
