Common Typographical Errors (Part 1)

Widow, orphan, bastard, shoemaker – do you know what these terms have to do with copywriting, or writing in the broad sense? If not, then you may be one of those people who write incorrectly without even realizing it.

Who among us has not had to write a longer text form at least once in their life? Working with text is not easy, and its author should take care not only of substantive correctness, but also of eliminating logical, spelling, punctuation and many other errors.
Although today’s text programs have the ability to automatically correct, are they able to catch all errors?

Widows and bastards

A widow is a line of text that contains only one word, or the very end of a word being moved (such as the word “all” in the left column in the photo below). Not everyone knows that this is seen as a typographical error that negatively affects the rhythm of the text being read. This error is easy to correct by editing the text or developing a flag.

Widows are often confused with bastards. The latter term refers to a situation in which a single word (or even just the end of a word) appears at the very top of the page, resulting in an uneven top edge of the text block. As in the first case, it would be a mistake to leave the text in this form.

Orphan

That is, a conjunction or a short word left at the end of a line. This error is easy to spot and can be associated with the author’s sloppiness. Interestingly, the rule prohibiting leaving hanging conjunctions occurs only in Polish and Czech – in other countries, this is not given much importance. The method of getting rid of orphans is also not the most difficult. It is enough to move them to the next line of text along with a hard space.

Incorrect quotation marks

Using “straight” quotation marks is still a very common practice. What are they in practice? They look “exactly like this” – that is, they are completely straight. These characters can be used as minute or second characters, but using them as quotation marks is incorrect. The good news is that the latest typesetting software has the option of changing straight quotation marks to printer’s quotation marks.

All of the above errors are easy to spot, so they can be avoided. Texts that contain a large number of them can be perceived as sloppy and unprofessional, and they also make reading them uncomfortable. There are many more typographical errors that are often encountered, which is why a second part of the text will soon be created, showing the remaining “sins” that occurred during the creation of texts.