The Typo Vibe Shift - The Atlantic

Listen−1.0x+<br>Seek<br>0:009:59

Toward the beginning of the 2002 film Secretary, a domineering lawyer (played by James Spader) barges into the office of his assistant (Maggie Gyllenhaal) with evidence of a work infraction: a memo she has written that has “three typing errors.” Spader’s character spits out a reprimand. “Do you know what this makes me look like to the people who receive these letters?”<br>Setting aside that his screed turns out to be foreplay, Spader’s character was channeling a widespread cultural revulsion: Typos were the ultimate shorthand for careless work. A spelling mistake was proof that the writer hadn’t bothered putting much effort into a piece of correspondence, that their instructions or advice shouldn’t be taken seriously—and perhaps that the recipient shouldn’t invest time in reading their note at all.<br>More than two decades later, as AI-generated writing has flooded workplaces, social media, and dating apps, old hallmarks of sloppiness—typos chief among them—are getting a new gloss.<br>Read: The problem with using AI in your personal life<br>Some job applicants are intentionally adding typos to their cover letters to prove that they, and not an AI program, wrote them. Celebrities and CEOs are sending out error-ridden emails and Instagram Stories, and instead of getting a scolding, they are praised for sounding authentic. On some dating apps, where people are, somewhat absurdly, prompted to compose their profiles with AI, typos are apparently no longer an automatic repellant. Nicole Ellison, a University of Michigan professor whose 2006 study showed that dating profiles with spelling mistakes turn people off, now thinks people are warming to the Tinder typo. “A typo maybe signals that you actually do care,” Ellison told Time recently, “because you took the time to write it yourself.” A 2024 study even found that people view customer-service chatbots more warmly when they make and correct errors: A spelling mistake, it seems, is a kind of anthropomorphizing event.<br>A peculiar reconfiguration of what people consider careless writing is taking place. Although typos and other mistakes don’t suddenly mean that a piece of writing is good or praiseworthy, to some people, they are at least signs that it is worth reading. On a base level, many of us are willing to invest time in reading a long email if we sense that someone actually wrote it, line by line.<br>In England’s early-modern period, starting around the 1500s, readers understood typos to be inevitable technological blunders. Books were produced collaboratively; writers sent off handwritten manuscripts to printers, who transposed them onto a printing press before setting them to paper. In the process, errors were often introduced.<br>Authors and editors cataloged these mistakes in “errata lists,” paratextual documents that they slipped into the books after publication—a last-ditch attempt to control the reception of their work. In these documents, they might lambaste their printers to explain the circumstance of mistakes, Alice Leonard, a professor at Coventry University who wrote about typos in Error in Shakespeare, told me. Authors would say, “I wasn’t able to be in the printing house at the time of printing,” Leonard said, or even blame the printer and claim that “the printer was drunk, or the printer was absent, or the printer is useless.” Instead of diminishing the book’s validity, errata lists lent an air of credibility; at least, the thinking went, someone had taken the time to point out what was wrong.<br>Some writers reveled in printing missteps. James Joyce, whose Ulysses contained more than 200 spelling or grammatical errors in an early edition, called his typos artful experiments in language, “beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.” By that time, though, he was likely already out of step with his peers: The widespread dissemination of typewriters seemed to recast the typo as a hallmark of individual laziness. With typewriters—and, later, personal computers—printed mistakes became a product of the writer’s failure to read their work closely.<br>Read: A corrected history of the typo<br>Today, of course, anybody can deliver supposedly clean writing by simply funneling their text through AI, which will churn out a version rife with strangely recurring words (delve), opening interjections (Here’s the thing:), and eerie grammar that’s almost too precise for a typical written exchange. The technological development is prompting people to embrace the old understanding of typos, forgiving misspellings as inevitable errors rather than treating them with scorn.<br>Even for celebrities, the occasional typo in a public statement is sometimes taken as proof that they are speaking from the heart. This spring, the singer Zara Larsson, who made an offhand remark in an interview that angered Taylor Swift fans, posted a defense in an Instagram Story that included at least two typos (among them a misspelling of physical as...