seriously Remington?

[Doomtown]

I like the play on words though, honest mistake or not. "Solid Billet of Steel. Sounds great, I was beginning to worry the billet they used wasn't solid

 

[Siglvr]

Maybe they saved a lot of money sending their technical writing work over to China?

 

[CLT65]

My wife bought the kids some books. I asked her if this was a very different story than I'm familiar with, or just a very bad typo. Yep, it's a very bad typo.

 

[WAYNO]

It's an honest mistake. The letter "d" and the letter "t" in the word "billet" are on the same keyboard.

Actually, you're not too far off.

In some modern American cultures and accents, the letter D, when occurring as the last letter of a word, is given the sound of a T.

His Dat (Dad) couldn't get his car startet (started). He knew he hat (had) a AAA cart (card), and calt (called) them up.






.

 

[CLT65]

I used to be the proof reader from hell. I've backed off, as even when I write something on a forum, I find flaws later that cause me to continually edit my own posts.

Some years ago, I wrote a paper for my Wife while she was attending college. (Don't ask).

The teacher tore it to pieces with corrections. But my paper was correct. I couldn't very well go to the school and plead my case that the teacher was unfair and incorrect with the paper I wrote for submission by my Wife.

I can relate. Typos, misspellings, grammatical errors, and incorrect punctuation bug me. Apostrophe misuse drives me nuts. I can't help it.

I'm always seeing errors in news articles. It seems like journalism is dead. Don't they do proof reading anymore? On top of that, it seems like a large percentage of "journalists" don't know the difference between an opinion article and a news article.

 

[cigars]

It's an honest mistake. The letter "d" and the letter "t" in the word "billet" are on the same keyboard.

Everyone makes mistakes, this is why we have proof readers. This marketing graphic was created, proofed and passed around several people prior to final approval. Sad that it got by but these things do. The sometimes it's intentional.

 

[Member 5605]

The company I work for hires out their web design. I spent a few days over the summer going through every page, finding typos, errors, incorrect links etc.

You'd be surprised how much of it slips by.

 

[CLT65]

The company I work for hires out their web design. I spent a few days over the summer going through every page, finding typos, errors, incorrect links etc.

You'd be surprised how much of it slips by.

I'd believe it. I write and update procedural documents once in a while, and find plenty of mistakes, some that have existed for years. Last year an auditor found a mistake on a document that I had updated locally, but had originally been written at the corporate level over 10 years ago, and reviewed many times, including by me. It was an error that made a substantive difference in the document. Fortunately it was an internal audit and I was allowed to simply fix it. Awful embarrassing, though...

 

[leadcounsel]

To the point on pervasive illiteracy: Funny/sad story, over a decade ago when I was in the Army I was reviewing an Army investigation which contained the usual evidence including sworn statements written by witnesses. One Soldier wrote, on a sworn statement (which is a professional military and federal document that could be used in Courtrooms or subject to a FOIA Congressional inquiry) his witness statement in text message shorthand format. For instance "B4, IDR, IIRC" etc.

 

[saread]

I think any of us who have to spend a lot of time with the written word are guilty of letting things like that get by. It's one of the reasons why when I write I always try have a non-subject matter person read my prose. If the person is not familiar with the subject, they are more likely to catch jargon, missing words, misspellings, incomprehensible phrases, etc. Basically, because of their lack of understanding, they tend to want to make sense of the material and not let their knowledge subconsciously fill in the blanks. A couple of months ago I was in a robust e-mail discussion with the author of a proposed ASTM standard. I was trying to point out that he needed to add a disclaimer on the applicability of his method or it could be misused by less than upstanding citizens for personal gain at the expense of honest consumers. I was having a devil of a time trying to get my point across. Then, I read the standard for the 7th or 8th time and the phrase I was arguing about just about smacked me in the face. It was there all along. I let my subject matter expertise, and my predisposition for not liking the standard anyway, let me read over the very thing that I thought was missing - several times! DOH! The mind is a horrible thing to waste, and misuse. Of course, I apologized and removed my objection to the new standard. Sometimes you just have to step away and take a look from 10,000 feet to gain understanding.

 

[User 1234]

US Army ad, ran like this for weeks on major news websites. This is a screenshot of one frame of the slideshow ad.

 

[P7M13]

Reliance on Spell Check = Laziness = First World Problem

 

[Rkangel]

At least they are consistent. Their proofreading is as good as their QC.

 

[saread]

Reliance on Spell Check = Laziness = First World Problem

Hmm.... Not sure I buy that. Spell check is a tool. Sort of like saying you should dig a ditch with your hands because it's lazy to use a shovel. It's just an aid. For as much stuff as I write, you can sure as heck believe that I'm not picking up a dictionary for every word I can't spell. There's a lot of those and I'd waste a bunch of time. Spell check is a big help in that regard. Not perfect. But, neither am I.

 

[Ura-Ki]

I find this in "News" stories daily, totally missed spelling ( and I cant spel my way out of a wet paper sack) or missing, misused sentence structure, or totally wrong syntax! And these people are in charge of the Ministry of Propaganda, you would thing Pride of Profession would be something!

 

[titsonritz]

HK still wins, in a world of compromise some men don't...

 

[P7M13]

Hmm.... Not sure I buy that. Spell check is a tool. Sort of like saying you should dig a ditch with your hands because it's lazy to use a shovel. It's just an aid. For as much stuff as I write, you can sure as heck believe that I'm not picking up a dictionary for every word I can't spell. There's a lot of those and I'd waste a bunch of time. Spell check is a big help in that regard. Not perfect. But, neither am I.

I think you gave a thoughtful response earlier, starting with having an individual, unfamiliar with the material, read.
The implication of my post is that proof reading is required, not just looking for words with squiggly underlines. Probable root cause for the misspelling is autocorrect modified whatever was typed to "billed" when "billet" is the proper term.
Proofreading *should* have caught that.
The analogy of shovel vs trowel vs hands does not apply.

 

[Hueco]

It's an honest mistake. The letter "d" and the letter "t" in the word "billet" are on the same keyboard.

It's not even that...have you seen some of the changes that spellcheck makes on your behalf? Especially with predictive text? I've written perfectly valid words only to have the AI Spellcheck change them to a similar looking word that it thinks I meant to type.

There's probably one person writing copy for their entire website and then passing those text blocks to a web dev who couldn't care less what the words say, only how it looks on the page. Usually, these copy writers are responsible for every block of text that you see: the website, brochures, emails, ads, etc. There's always 60 hours of writing to get done in a 50 hour week.

Let's cut this poor guy some slack. It's an honest mistake.

 

[washagonian]

I suppose it's buyer beware - better make sure it IS a misspelling.

 

[saread]

I think you gave a thoughtful response earlier, starting with having an individual, unfamiliar with the material, read.
The implication of my post is that proof reading is required, not just looking for words with squiggly underlines. Probable root cause for the misspelling is autocorrect modified whatever was typed to "billed" when "billet" is the proper term.
Proofreading *should* have caught that.
The analogy of shovel vs trowel vs hands does not apply.

I'm with you there. But that's not what you said, or implied, in the previous post. At least as I read it. Maybe could have used second set of eyes not so close to the subject (see what I did there?). Proof reading is certainly something that needs to occur. We all rely on spell check to assist us with that, in that sense it is the shovel. To the degree that it is relied on in the process really depends on what you're writing. I don't spend a lot of time proof reading these sorts of missives. I rely on spell check considerably here. My spelling isn't atrocious, but my typing is. This is just fluff and if it isn't perfect, meh. I'm not particularly put out by it. However, if I'm into something weighty, you can bet that it's going to get a lot of scrutiny. Spelling, grammar, organization, facts, font, form, et. al., ad infinitum. The level of effort is commensurate with the importance of the product and the audience. Power Point presentations for a professional group is really going to get a solid look by lots of eyes. Even so, we're only human and not perfect. I've caught some interesting things in the middle of a presentation. Depending on how bad it is, it can be a real test of your public speaking skills to recover. Fun times.