Reading · Everything Essay! with Andrea A. Firth

I recently bought a new blue-tooth keyboard. For months, the “h” key on my old keyboard didn’t work unless you tapped the key with extra vigor, which I lacked, so my emails and docs were riddled with missing-h-typos: I tink so, tank you, tat’s he ting—you get wat I mean. One friend told me that she found my missing-h-typos endearing, which I thought was a generous take given that I’m an editor. So I was intrigued to recently read Brenda Miller’s flash essay entitled “Typos” in Short Reads to see what she has to say about what she calls “happy mistakes.”

Welcome to Everything Essay! where we read an essay together and study the craft at work. Go ahead and read Brenda Miller’s essay, “Typos” now—it’s about 700 words and will take about 3 minutes to read.

“Typos” is a four-part, segmented flash essay. Each segment starts with a brief quoted phrase that has a typo, including: an incorrect letter, where wine becomes wind; a missing letter, where thought becomes though and hope becomes hop; and two letters transposed where dog becomes god. Miller explores these transformed words and the new meaning of the phrases as she weaves in her own stories too. Let’s look at the craft at work in each segment.

“Maybe we’ll go wind tasting”

Miller looks at wind through the lens of wine: Winds assume the flavor of the land in which they originate—a terroir—and vary by how long they’ve aged. Written in the second person point of view, the reader is encouraged to sample wind in the way one tastes wine—to cup, smell, and then sip their wind through the nose, on the lips and along the tongue. Like wine, wind has varietals: the breeze, the whisper, the gale, the chinook, Santa Ana, sirocco and mistral. Like wine, wind carries hints of flowers, fruit and spices. Miller cleverly plays with language here. And as the segment closes, she turns to a personal narrative, walking alone in a village in France at sunrise, in heartbreaking silence—a moment that eludes a tasteful description.

“She looks deep in though”

In this segment, Miller writes in the third-person about the miscarriages, the boyfriend, and the drunk man. These are all connected to true events from Miller’s past, which I know because I’ve been reading Miller’s personal essays for years and she has written about these relationships before.

She repeats the phrase Perhaps she three times in row, which catches the reader’s attention, adds emphasis, and provides a nice rhythm and flow to the prose. This writing technique is referred to as the rule of threes. Lately that technique has been getting a bad rap, because AI writing tools tend to overuse patterns like it.

But it’s AI’s overuse that’s the problem. Any writing technique becomes cliche and cumbersome when used too often, which doesn’t make it bad technique but poor application. For example, I arrange the plants in my garden in threes, because I like the way it looks. And, I still group words, phrases and sentences in threes when that structure fits and elevates the writing, because it sounds right.

We learn about the narrator’s experience in theater and are given a hint at the close that maybe she was hiding behind the characters she played. What do you think about the last sentence? She became characters thought up by someone else, embodiments of another’s imagination. Note how this is the one time the word thought is used in the segment. See how this paragraph and the one before, albeit both are short, each has a beginning, middle and end—its own narrative arc.

I Tink So, Tank You

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