Haunted by the spelling mistakes all around us, spare a thought for the editors

Whatever your career, you’ll be left with the marks of it. The scars of battle, literal scars in some cases.

Pneumatic drill operators might be cursed by “vibration white finger”, but for editors the legacy of years in the newsroom can be more subtle.

The trouble is, when you’ve been trained to sharpen copy, spot errors, check grammar and fix typos, it’s just very hard to stop dead when the factory whistle blows. This will shock you, but people don’t appreciate the input of an editor as much as you might think.

It’s not just about being a pedant (although, to be honest, it is quite a lot about being a pedant), but about placing too much value in the quality of the written word. Turns out no one likes having their emails scoured for style points. It’s a lesson we have to quickly learn.

Briefly in the early 2000s it became mainstream. Lynne Truss published Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a primal scream against the grocer’s apostrophe and misused hyphens. It even included punctuation stickers so you could make your own corrections in the street or the supermarket.

That flush of fashionability has long faded. I have to bite my tongue when reading through my kids’ homework (they’re prone to non-sequiturs). I have to make an effort not to scan friends’ and family’s social media posts for internal inconsistencies or a buried lede. Mostly I succeed.

But sometimes this curse is inescapable. Around London, branches of Pret a Manger are ubiquitous (one former colleague has calculated you could visit 54 Prets on a brisk walk around the City without ever being more than five minutes from the next). That wouldn’t be a problem, but for the huge wall-hogging sign full of overwritten nonsense about the additives “common to so much of the ‘prepared’ and ‘fast’ food on the market today”.

I have to sit with my back to it. It’s the kind of painful copy that should have stayed in the boardroom bin.

But perhaps the most infuriating example is in my hometown, where the local church taunts me with a sign at the entrance which reads: “The Church is open now.”

I’m aware that this may not seem horrifically objectionable. But after a decade or two in the newsroom, trying to strip away the needless and mundane, the instinct is immediate. All I want to do is point out far too loudly that if the sign is placed by the church door, where a large majority of people will be reading it at that very moment – then, seriously, just “OPEN” would be fine.

Yours,

Joel Dimmock

Voices deputy editor