Embarrassing Press Release Creates A Bad “Spell” Of Publicity For A Toronto Firm

As anyone who’s ever dealt with the written word on the web can attest, those typos will kill you. And not even the most scrupulous editor can catch them all.

So when a Toronto company put out a list of the most commonly misspelled words to hype their typo-correcting software this week, it seemed like the perfect P.R. stunt.

Instead, it resulted in a huge embarrassment for TextTrust. It turns out the press release itself had a typographical error. That was followed by this rueful mea culpa from the agency that distributed the original announcement:

“We are advised by the company that the first paragraph, second sentence, should read “16 million web pages” rather than “16 million we (sic) pages” as originally issued inadvertently,” the correction noted.

The public relations consultant behind the press release was red faced and horrified. “It’s very embarrassing,” admits Pat Brink. “I made the mistake, not TextTrust — they do a much better job. It’s certainly egg on the face of this public relations person.”

The company uses software and human editors to scour its clients’ websites, trying to find typos that were missed or rearranged by the auto-correct feature on some word processing applications, like Microsoft Word.

“TextTrust wants to make sure that organizations never again receive the ‘I found a spelling error on your web site’ e-mail,” its press notice related. But when the announcement came out, the firm’s email box was clogged with copious corrections, pointing out the error.

Still, if it’s true that any publicity is good publicity, TextTrust has received a lot more from the errant notice than it could ever have dreamed.

The story has made headlines across the world, appearing in the Washington Post, the BBC, MSNBC, the Reuters news service and in newspapers from as far away as South Africa and Singapore.

Proving only that no one’s prefect – er – perfect.

So what are the ten most commonly misspelled words on the web? Here’s the list.

        Incorrect                   Correct

     1) Independant            Independent
     2) Accomodation         Accommodation
     3) Definately                 Definitely
     4) Recieve                     Receive
     5) Opportunites           Opportunities
     6) Thier                          Their
     7) Occured                    Occurred
     8) Infomation                Information
     9) Offical                        Official
    10) Acitives                    Activities

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