I almost felt sympathy for (empathy with?) the GMC the other day. Almost, but not quite.
Some smarty pants who will remain nameless (Anthony Roberts) had written in to GMC Today, the regulator’s magazine, criticising a mistake in the copy.
He wrote: “I found the juxtaposition of your article ‘Mistakes Happen’ with your own typo mistake in the following article title ‘…Office of the Health Professions Adjudicator (OPHA)’ [sic] rather illuminating. Your article stressed systems failure in prescribing. Your typo was a systems failure, in that spell checkers cannot accommodate all the millions of acronyms we now use, and are thus often disabled. I am sure we can learn from this example.”
Ouch!
I can’t talk. In the good old days, trade mags had banks of these strange creatures called sub-editors who’d turn writers’ amateurish scribblings into purple prose.
As the money leaked out of the industry, most of them rather unfairly got the chop and returned to their underground lairs.
So now, dear reader, the illiteracy of many writers is being exposed to the world with only a spell checker standing between them and ignominy (as you can see from this reader’s feedback at the bottom of another article on, surprise, surprise, the GMC).
Double ouch!
In reality, typos in Hospital Dr are more a personal failure than a systemic one. If you spot a significant one please let me know at editorial@hospitaldr.co.uk (free sub-editing: why didn’t I think of this earlier?!) but maybe reserve the withering scorn for the GMC.
