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ERRORS IN FAMOUS LITERATURE

Badly Written English

Mistakes in popular literature

John Hansen PAL
5 min readMay 18, 2023

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Blindfolded girl reading a book outdoors
Image by Angel Hernandez from Pixabay

The dirty secret of art is you don’t have to show people your bad writing. That’s what we have the delete key for.

— Robert McKee

Typos, Spelling Mistakes, and Other Grammatical Tragedies

As every writer will know it is all too easy to make typos, spelling mistakes, and grammatical errors in our work, whether it be a novel, short story, poem, article, blog, advert, essay, whatever. Just one slip of the finger on the keyboard can change the whole meaning of a sentence or stanza. I have made numerous corrections as I typed this first paragraph.

Spell checkers and programs like Grammarly have helped to a certain degree but with the number of words that are pronounced the same but with different spelling (especially in English) mistakes in literature are still a common problem. Writers today are fortunate to have these aids at our disposal but spare a thought for the authors of earlier times (before computer technology) who had no such things.

We are always hopeful that proofreading our first draft will pick up most errors, and then if we can afford an editor they will find any…

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John Hansen PAL
John Hansen PAL

Written by John Hansen PAL

Freelancer, short fiction writer, and award-winning poet who loves experimenting with different styles and genres. Writing is in my soul and it won't leave!

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