I’m editing an RFP response in my usual workplace: my home office. The rest of the team is elsewhere: other home offices, regular offices in other cities altogether.
Slogging through an experience section, I come across a cute typo: A realty corporation’s name is rendered as “Sunshine Reality Inc.” Well, not “Sunshine,” but the actual name doesn’t matter.
It’s not a big deal, but every sliver of, well, sunshine, is worth celebrating in Proposal Land, especially at this time of year when we start work in the dark and end it way after dark has fallen again.
So I send it out to some editor friends who are also slogging away in the dark, literally and figuratively, and receive a prize-winning one in return: Hated Requirements, for Rated Requirements.
In life, in death, in that strange middle ground that is Proposal Land – we are not alone. Thanks be.
The only typo I was almost persuaded to keep in my Nebraska By Dummies, Volume One was typing “tits” for “its”, for which no apology is necessary, said John. (I may have already posted this.)
It’s what called in the biz as “a howler”. They happen. Own them.
Barbara – I’ve read many books; not sure I’ve ever seen one without a typo. I tell those who get obsessed with unattainable perfection on proposals that we’re not making the Book of Kells. An editor friend who has actually seen said Book said, “They had all the time in the world, and they still made mistakes.” Part of the human condition, methinks.