Typographical Errors and Client Protection¹

Typographical errors can be funny, as some of the examples below will show. Yet, we’ve all experienced that sinking feeling in the pit of our stomach when we realize that we sent a document to a client or submitted a document to a court with a typographical error on page 2. This article strives to raise your awareness of the importance of proofreading and to provide some tips to increase your proofreading skills in order to better serve your clients and yourself.

In addition to being an embarrassment, typographical errors erode the writer’s credibility.² Typographical errors can also harm the client. In a recent case, a federal district court observed:

[P]laintiff’s response… [is] so riddled with typographical mistakes, grammatical errors, and faulty punctuation that the court had difficulty following plaintiff’s arguments. For example… the court has never seen such creative spellings of the words technologist (spelled, alternately, “tecnologist” and “technolgoist”) and occasionally (spelled “occassinaly”), and has never heard of the words “accomopdation,” “tranprot,” “studnet,” and “internshp.”³

Not only do courts view typographical errors as unprofessional, and clients and opposing counsel as indicating incompetence, they can also cause direct monetary harm. Courts have slashed fee awards in half because of substantial grammatical and typographical errors in briefs.⁴

While to err is human, you can act to reduce typos. Proofreading is an important step in the writing process. It requires a different kind of attention than necessary to prepare documents, since the focus instead must be on individual words, not the ideas conveyed.

Spell-checkers built into many software programs provide some respite to the hard work of proofreading. The federal district court referenced above “strongly recommend[ed] (and that’s one “c” and two “m”s) that in the future, plaintiff’s counsel proofread and spell-check all documents submitted to this and any other court.”⁵ In fact, the spell-check and auto-correct features built into Word and other programs do catch many common mistakes.

While technology provides great assistance, it can also create problems. Texas federal district judge Sam Sparks published an “ode to the spell-checker” this emphasizes the humor that reliance on technology can create:

Eye have a spelling chequer, It came with my pea sea. It plainly marques four my revue Miss Steaks eye kin knot sea. Eye strike a key and type a word and weight four it two say Weather Eye am wrong oar write It shows me strait a weigh. As soon as a mist ache is maid, It nose bee fore two long, and Eye can put the error rite -- Its rare lea ever wrong. Eye have run this poem threw it I am shore your pleased two no, Its letter perfect awl the weigh. My spell chequer tolled me sew.⁶

So, don’t rely solely on spell-check. While it is always helpful to have another person proofread your work, proofreading often falls to the writer. For example, software cannot distinguish between homonyms, which can lead to some of the most common errors. Human labor is still necessary. Below are some strategies to maximize your proofreading prowess:

Give yourself a break. It is difficult to move from the creation process to the proofreading process. Ideally, you should put any work away for two days before proofreading it. However, even if you can only set the work aside for thirty minutes, you will be a more effective proofreader.

Read it backwards. No, we don’t mean like spinning a Beatles’ album to find secret messages! Instead, read the last sentence first, the penultimate sentence next, and so on to allow you to focus on each sentence without getting distracted by substance.

Read it out of order. This is another way to avoid getting caught up in the substance and is especially helpful on a large document. Instead of starting at page one and proofreading to page 50, start near the end, then work the front. Or, when proofreading an appellate brief, start with the statement of facts, then proof the conclusion, then the second argument, and so on.

Create white space. Sometimes words just blur. To fight this, use two pieces of blank white paper to hide all the text except for one or two lines.

Read it aloud. Sometimes our eyes deceive us. We don’t catch the missing word, or we miss the double word. Reading the work aloud can help you focus on what is on the page and, just as importantly, what is not on the page.

Watch for the common typos. This chart identifies common typographical errors (including those spell-check and autocorrect miss).

1. By Assistant Professor Karen Sneddon and Professor David Hricik, both of Mercer University School of Law in Macon, Georgia. Mercer’s legal writing program is ranked number one in the country by U.S. News.
2. For an analysis of experiments that assess the impact of spelling errors on the reader’s perception of the author’s writing ability, see Michael J. Costello et al., Effects of Spelling Errors on the Perception of Writers, Journal of General Psychology (2002), available at http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-86431655.html.
3. Chen v. Galen Hosp. Ill., Inc., 1999 WL 104723, at *1 (N.D. Ill. Feb. 23, 1999). See also Thompson v. Nicholson, 2007 WL 956928, at *3 (Vet. App. Mar. 13, 2007) (emphasizing that poor grammar also “does not reflect well on the practitioner’s professionalism”).
4. See Devore v. City of Philadelphia, 2004 WL 414085, at *3 (E.D. Pa. Feb. 20, 2004).
5. Chen, 1999 WL 104723 at *1.
6. Reprinted in Jerry Buchmeyer, Ode to the Spell Checker, 64 Tex. B.J. 69 (June 2001).
7. Thankfully, Word 2007 will catch this particular typographical error.
8. Thankfully, Word 2007 will catch this one, too.