(Repertório)
Australia put a typo on 46 million banknotes
A radio listener with a magnifying glass found a misspelled word on Australia's $50 note. The reason nobody saw it sooner is the same reason your caption's typo hides until you post.
Mateus CremonDesigner, Cremon Studio · 2 min read
You reread the caption ten times before posting, and it's perfect all ten times. Then you post it, open your feed, and there's the typo on the second line, like someone slipped it in afterward.
If it helps, the Reserve Bank of Australia has been there too. On 46 million banknotes.
The $50 note
In October 2018, Australia put a new $50 note into circulation. On the note, above Edith Cowan's shoulder, there's a block of tiny text, an excerpt from her first speech to the Western Australian Parliament, in 1921.
The word "responsibility" shows up three times in that text. All three times, it's spelled "responsibilty," missing the third i.
A radio listener caught it, looking at the note through a magnifying glass, and sent a photo to Triple M, an Australian radio station, which posted it in May 2019. The Reserve Bank confirmed the mistake.
By then, 46 million notes with the misspelled word had been in circulation for seven months. They went through millions of hands, and it took a magnifying glass for anyone to notice.
Why the writer can't see it
In 2014, Tom Stafford, a psychologist at the University of Sheffield, explained to Wired why it's so hard to catch typos in your own writing.
Writing, he says, is a high-level task, and whoever wrote the text already knows what it's supposed to say. When you reread it, your brain blends what's on the screen with what it expects to see and fills in the gaps on its own.
That's why the tenth reread doesn't help much. You're reading the caption in your head, and that one's spelled right.
To be fair, this is an expert's explanation, not the result of an experiment.
The feed changes the font
In the same article, Stafford's tip for catching typos is to change how the text looks. Switch the font, change the background color, or print it out.
Anyone who works in print knows the expensive version of this, when the layout you checked on screen only shows its typo once it comes back from the printer, on paper.
Posting does the same thing to your caption. The text leaves the box where you typed it and shows up somewhere else, in a different font, in the middle of other people's feeds.
The Triple M listener needed a magnifying glass. You've got the feed, which does it for you, in front of everyone.
