Of Interest: What’s the Worst That Could Happen? The Hidden Costs of Typos

Everyone makes typos, right? It’s part of being a technical communicator. We do our best to spot them before our content is released, and award mugs to those who spot them for us after the fact.

No one’s perfect though. Sometimes a mistake will slip through. What’s the worst that can happen? A radioactive bomb? Well, actually…

On 9 May 2018, I went to a well-attended presentation called “What’s the Worst That Could Happen? The Hidden Costs of Typos” at a tekom Israel event in Haifa, Israel.

In his presentation, Yehoshua Paul asked the audience, “If your documents have mistakes, what’s the worst that could happen? The SME complains, your boss complains? At least if the customer complains, it means that you know that they read it!”

Errors in the documentation can have important consequences. They hinder communication, confuse and frustrate readers, and cause users to make mistakes – sometimes quite serious ones.

Yehoshua discussed how simple typos ended up causing hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars in damage, caused the Mars Orbiter to crash, cost an Israeli helicopter pilot his life – and also resulted in a radioactive bomb.

While these examples are admittedly extreme (and hopefully rare!), Yehoshua clearly made his point that technical editors have a critical role in ensuring documentation quality.

So what do we as technical editing practitioners need to do to help catch and prevent documentation errors?

Yehoshua made the following suggestions:

• Make sure that there are sufficient SME reviews for content accuracy and completeness (especially for procedures)
• Enforce the use of a corporate style guide for increased content clarity
• Improve communication between writers and editors – the more eyes looking for errors, the more likely they are to be caught!