The Great iHop Spelling Blunder

Great Spelling Fails - “iHop-gate”

August 4^th 2015 Sally Ormond iHop, importance of proofreading, proofreading, spelling errors

I’ve written several posts about the importance of proofreading and why you should pay attention to your spelling (the link takes you to a selection of articles on the subject), but a recent trip to Florida made me smile.

To paraphrase Alexander Pope “to err is human”. No matter who you are, how well educated or from what profession, sooner or later you will make a spelling or grammatical gaff - I know I have.

The trick is to:

Keep errors to a minimum
Find and correct them before others spot them

The odd typo in a blog post can be forgiven. A miss-spelt word in your web copy can easily be corrected. A blunder in your brochure is a bit more tricky, but probably won’t be picked up by the majority of people (if it is, at least it shows you are human).

However, you would expect a simple three word sign to be error free - not at iHop, St Petersburg, Florida.

Spelling fail at iHop

Would you have confidence in a restaurant looking for an “Exper Cook”?

Granted, the pancakes are amazing (although I failed miserably when confronted with 4 blueberry ones - only managing to eat two), but you would have thought someone would have noticed the blunder.

To give them the benefit of the doubt, it is possible the “T” blew away in one of the many thunderstorms I experienced whilst out there, but then again…

The moral of the story is to check, check again and then get someone else to check your writing before publishing.