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Comment by sundance0 | Hacker News Reader

> Y Combinator is Silicon Valley’s premiere early stage investor.

Shouldn't it be 'premier'? I know, not a big deal, but a mistake on the first line doesn't scream 'Best in the Business' if you ask me.

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Fixed. Thanks. I can't tell you how many times I and others read over that and somehow missed it. So it goes with typos.

Typos tend to materialize when you hit 'submit', 'publish' or other similarly labeled buttons. Very annoying. At least we've left the days of lead type behind so fixing is a bit quicker.

Sometimes I wonder if those buttons have some kind of 'scramble grammar' logic built into them...

"I can't tell you how many times I and others read over that"

From years of being in the graphics business I noted that people tended to miss words that weren't particularly difficult but at the same time (and same people) usually caught difficult words.

My reasoning was that people "chunk" the easy frequent words but slow down and think about every letter in the difficult words.

Some of the most common errors were actually with the city names and street addresses (and numbers) for example.

I've read that when not perusing the text we are only looking at the first and last letters of a word and in some cases the general shape of the word to determine which word it is, leading to frequent typos by otherwise very intelligent thoughtful people. Cheers to YC.

  lead the world, create jobs, and tremendous value

needs another "create". much more minor than the other typo though!

In a letter like this is it typical to state credentials before stating the intention of the letter? I'm not an expert in persuasive writing, but the form I learned was something like this:

  1. question, concern or objection

  2. bona fides and background information

  3. vision for change or outcome

  4. call to action

There are probably a multitude of theories on how to persuade or influence people, so I'm genuinely curious what the thought process was for writing something like this.

P.S.

Thanks for fighting the good fight!

The parent post is about the typo of 'premier' as 'premiere', not about whether it's appropriate to state credentials before the intent of the letter.

Most of the other comments are political in nature, so I thought my comment fit better with the one comment about editing.

American political writing, especially to courts and legal bodies but in some cases also public appeals (like campaign ads and ballot statements on propositions in CA) tend to swap 1 and 2; I believe this is with the intent of making the statements on the issue a more coherent and concise message.

I believe that in legal writing, there's the additional intent of making it easier for a professional to skip over the boilerplate introductions of the bona fides and jump straight to the relevant content - and make no mistake, this is absolutely a legal filing, intended to persuade a small group of professionals, with their careers and maybe also some actual principles at stake. The effect on the broader public is kind of incidental.

I would put that mistake on the same level as "typo" and hope that it would be missed or ignored, if it can't be corrected. It's a deeply unimportant error that in no way hinders the understanding of the message.

Pointing it out here can only help.

True, but that's not a forum post, that's a document that aims to change policy and as such it pays off to put your best foot forward so the GP has absolutely done the right thing in calling that one out so it could be fixed.

I agree with you (and fnordfnordfnord), but I was under the impression that this is a duplicate of a document already sent, in which case what was sent can't be retracted and edited. I certainly didn't mean to come across as critical of pointing out the typo.

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