In Defense Of The Typo

The beauty of the imperfect

I’m not phenomenal at spelling. I can’t even spell phenomenal without messing it up and second-guessing myself. My grammar isn’t much better. My ideas have always moved faster than my fingers. Which means you’re much more likely to encounter a mistake in my writing before my main point.

I’ve always seen it as a providential gift that I was born in the age of word processors. Even more, I had my grandmother, who was willing and able to edit my papers when I was young. Today, her role is filled by a Grammarly Pro account.

And still, even now, the mistakes remain. What lingers longer than the errors themselves is the quiet shame that comes with them.

Which is why it feels strange to live in a moment where perfection no longer means what it used to.

I was reading on Substack recently about AI writing—how to spot it, how to name it. For years, things like the em dash I just used have been treated as tells, effectively rendering all those years of learning and practicing the difference between an en dash and an em dash pointless. Yet for all of that, the article ended with something more interesting. It noted how the typo has become a fingerprint of a human author.

We’ve reached a point where flawless writing is cheap. Perfect grammar. Elegant phrasing. Polished cadence. All of it can be produced instantly, endlessly, and without effort or fatigue. Machines can now write better than most humans ever could—certainly better than I can. And because of that, the signal has flipped. What once marked writing as inferior or careless now marks it as human.

For years, the imperfections in my writing felt like a deficit I had to overcome to be taken seriously. Now, strangely, those same imperfections feel like a form of grace. And yet, grace where so much shame once lived is not easy to accept.

I would much rather be perfect on my own merits than be received as imperfect. There is something in me that prefers achievement to mercy. I want to be good enough—good enough on my own.

But I never have been.

And I don’t mean that as a claim of impossibility, or a denial of growth. I have improved. I’m a better writer today than I ever have been. Years of reading and writing have trained my eye and sharpened my voice. Practice has mattered. Effort has made a difference.

What isn’t true and what doesn’t match the story I tell myself is that I don’t want grace, or that I would refuse it if it were offered. My own history says otherwise. My grandmother patiently marked my papers. Clippy, the paperclip in Microsoft Word, helpful notes. And now Grammarly Pro, constantly catching what I miss. I have not rejected this help. I have accepted it at every stage.

So maybe what is true is that I want credit more than I want mercy. I want improvement to count as proof that I did this on my own. But that desire doesn’t lead to freedom. I know this. It leads to anxiety. If I get the credit, then I also carry the weight. And every mistake only threatens the story I tell myself about myself.

So I write in defense of the typo. To advocate for the beauty of the imperfect. Not as a celebration of failure, but as a recognition that the same imperfections that remain in my writing also remain in me, and that God continues to use them to loosen my grip on any claim of self-justification and redirect my desire toward mercy.

I am far from perfect. I don’t say that to lessen or excuse the consequences of missing the mark. Sometimes I was so far off target that my arrows went straight into the people I love and the strangers standing nearby. And if I’m honest, I confess that it wasn’t always an accident either. There are times when I was aiming right at the person I hit and hurt.

I don’t celebrate that. My sin grieves me. But it is a grief I want to be shaped by hope, not despair. The apostle Paul distinguishes between a worldly sorrow that leads to death and a godly grief that leads to life. He writes, “For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.” (2 Cor. 7:10, ESV)

So I write in defense of the typo. But not in defense of its permanence. In defense of its purpose in my life. My goal is not to make peace with imperfection. The goal is to it to learn from it. To be shaped by it.

So I worry about the day my writing comes back without correction, lest I be tempted to take credit rather than give thanks, and to claim as my own what has been given. In the same way, I am wary of any confidence that leaves me less dependent on the Holy Spirit rather than more. Growth, after all, does not graduate us from grace; it trains us to rely on it more fully.