Authored by Karen Jent, Senior PR Consultant, GRIP Agency
Some communicators now add typos to show a real person wrote a text. But sounding human does not automatically earn you trust with your audience. Lessons from science communication suggest a better approach: find a unique voice, say something worth reading and take responsibility for what you publish. In other words: start speaking through the page.
AI-generated content is everywhere. Inboxes and feeds are overflowing, and every email, article or video now raises two important questions for the reader: can this be trusted, and did a person write it?
This is where a recent trend comes in. It encourages writers to use flaws and imperfections strategically to signal human authorship. Picture this: a CEO slipping a typo into an HR memo, a celebrity leaving a misspelling in a social post, a communications officer posting an unedited video, all designed to make the content look less polished.
The goal of this tactic is to convince readers that a message was authored by a person, not a machine. Ironically, the trend gained attention when Sinceerly was launched, an AI tool that adds spelling mistakes back in for a humanising effect.
Not so long ago, typos stood for sloppiness and carelessness that often overshadowed content. A typo in a cover letter, for example, used to get applicants dismissed immediately. Today, it might be what makes them stand out as someone who cares enough to pen the letter themselves.
Seen this way, the typo has become what the Atlantic calls ‘an anthropomorphizing event’: a means of messaging more authentically and a signal of human consciousness amid the drudgery of slop.
Trust grows slowly
Like many of us, I crave authenticity in my media feeds. But as a specialist at the intersection of science and applied communication, the strategic use of imperfection makes me uncomfortable. Polishing content to a high standard has long been a hallmark of building trust in my field.
Take stem cell research. Scientists grow live cells in bright red liquid, inside incubators at 37 °C, to study the body’s ability to heal. They hope that, one day, their findings may be safe enough to treat patients with cancer, severe burns or macular degeneration. But when they publish initial results, researchers are still years away from clinical application.
Communication about stem cell research thus demands great care. It is about more than finding accessible language for complex topics. Every claim, in addition, needs to be backed up with evidence, and limitations and uncertainties must be stated honestly. Done consistently, science communication paves the way for trust and respectful dialogue across the power differential between researchers and patients.
Why typos backfire
In science communication, a typo works like a radio jammer. It disrupts the hard-earned connection between scientists and their audiences. After all, how are non-specialists supposed to distinguish the carelessness of a spelling mistake from the carelessness of a factual imprecision?
To take patients and other public audiences seriously, science communicators should take care with both their fact-checking and their spelling.
As technologies that are both highly uncertain and laden with hope, stem cells show how hard it is to build public trust, and how easy it is to lose. Deliberately inserting flaws in this context is a bad idea.
Corporate communication faces the same test. Consider a CEO announcing job cuts in an internal memo. Employees read every line for what it says about the company’s future and their own. A deliberate typo in that memo won’t make the CEO seem closer. Instead, it raises a question no leader wants at that moment: if they didn’t check the spelling, did they check the figures?
Wherever hope, uncertainty and trust meet, in a restructuring, a product recall or the debate about AI, the lessons of stem cell research apply. So, let’s forgo the typos.
Let’s anthropomorphise differently
It makes sense that we are drawn to imperfection. After all, we are imperfect human beings. We live through messy times of technological change, and we struggle with the uncertainties of it all. Seeing that struggle mirrored in others, flawed and imperfect, certainly sends a humanising signal.
With this in mind, there are better ways to show up authentically, though. It can be as simple as someone talking to us genuinely, in their own voice, whether they are a scientist, a CEO or a family member.
Writing coach Roy Peter Clark defines voice as the art of reaching ‘the reader through his ears, even when he is receiving the message through his eyes.’ In other words, voice is the effect of spoken language in the written word, as if someone were speaking to us directly through the page.
Voice is famously hard to achieve. But when it works, it has elements that clearly distinguish it from the all-seeing, all-knowing panoptic gaze of AI: specificity and a perspective rooted in lived experience.
Sounding human may get the reader’s attention. But earning their trust takes more: saying something useful and purposeful, being honest about what we don’t know, and standing behind what we publish. Communication is not just about having a human touch. It is more specifically about building connection through the vulnerability of a particular standpoint.
Sources
- Clark, Roy Peter. 2006. Writing Tools: 55 essential strategies for every writer, Little, Brown and Spark.
- Now there’s an AI tool that adds typos into your emails — so it looks like you didn’t use AI
- The Typo Vibe Shift
