As I finish up on 15 years of proofreading here at the Star Herald, I still love my job.
One of the most amusing aspects of my job is to see the many ways that a missed or mistyped letter can potentially get us into trouble.
The first week that I showed up for proofreading at the Star Herald in late September 2004, I came at my job with a great amount of confidence in my abilities. I just knew that I could find every little wrong thing that might otherwise show up in print, because, after all, I had an English major degree from Mankato State.
You can imagine my angst about my job security as a proofreader when I returned to work the second week to peals of laughter from my co-workers and a big sign posted at my work station with the letter “l” underlined in the word “public.”
We had run a letter to the editor in the previous week’s edition (Oct. 7, 2004) in which a lovely Christian woman had lamented the demise of society and was upset that “... now we can no longer display the Ten Commandments in any public place.” I had somehow not seen that the “l” was missing in the word “public.”
Well, after the story raced through the community coffee groups and bridge clubs ... and I had shared it with my family and friends ... the management still kept me on.
That could have been a mistake, because it happened again!
Same word, same letter.
Only it happened in my own responses to a questionnaire for the Star Herald just two weeks later when I ran a write-in campaign for Luverne City Council alderman in the fall of 2004.
I had responded that a goal of mine was “...to disseminate accurate information to the public.”
Guess what?! The “l” was missing again in the same word when the newspaper went to print.
That’s when I took matters into my own hands and figured out how to reprogram the computer of the composition editor as well as my own computer so they would not recognize the word “pubic” as correctly spelled and to auto-correct it to “public.”
Since then we think that “l” has never gone missing in the word “public.”
But never say never.