Costly Typos Encourage Good Spelling & Grammar

-
When I teach research & writing to law students, it can be a challenge to get them to buy-in to the notion that they should take great care with their writing - particularly punctuation - with commas specifically.

To encourage care, I highlight cases that have turned on punctuation or the high cost that can result from a typo. Winning cases and saving money tends to get their attention.

There is a post on Mental Floss that discusses some interesting and expensive examples of costly typos..
  • A missing hyphen in a code cost NASA $80 million
  • A spelling mistake in an eBay ad cost the seller $502,996
  • An extra letter in a word caused accounting software to pay out $2.8m instead of $1.4m
These examples are good classroom fodder to make a lecture on punctuation and grammar just a little more interesting. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

For The Love Of Archives

-
On a night out last month, I was on my way to a R. Buckminster Fuller documentary at the Detroit Institute of Arts when my friend asked me, "why do we need libraries and librarians when everything is online?" I hardly had a moment to answer because the documentary was about to start, but I did rattle something off about the slow process of digitization and the need to organize the world's information. Then something magical happened. During the beginning of the documentary, the narrator went into great detail about his visit to the Dymaxion Chronofile . "The Dymaxion Chronofile is Buckminster Fuller's attempt to document his life as completely as possible. He created a very large scrapbook in which he documented his life every 15 minutes from 1920 to 1983. The total collection is estimated to be 270 feet (80 m) worth of paper. This is said to be the most documented human life in history." And the very reason that we still have this wonderful piece of rec
Read more

US News Scholarship Impact Issues

-
Image
In spring 2017, I briefly discussed the issues  with scholarship impact factor in law as a response to a recommendation by a law professor to create a rankings methodology based on Google Scholar citation. Now US News is trying to get in the game of creating a ranking of law faculty by scholarship impact factor using Hein publication metrics. US News is asking each law school for the names and other details of its fall 2018 full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty. US News plans to link the names of each individual law school's faculty to citations and publications that were published in the previous five years and are available in HeinOnline. Using this data, HeinOnline will compile faculty scholarly impact indicators for each law school . This will include such measures as mean citations per faculty member, median citations per faculty member, and total number of publications. Those measures will then be provided to US News for use in eventually creating a comprehensiv
Read more

AALL/LexisNexis Call for Papers 2019-2020 Now Open!

-
Image
The winners in the Open, New Member, and Student Divisions will receive $650 , and the Short Form Division winner will receive $300 , all generously donated by LexisNexis. Co-authors of winning papers share awards. Recipients are recognized during award ceremonies at the AALL Annual Meeting and will be given the opportunity to present their papers in a program. See the Call for Papers website !
Read more