One Misspelling and Your Paper Gets an Automatic F, No Ekseptions

I found out who I was when I was 13 — I was a genius, which nobody else knew but I went off to college to channel my teen angst into poetic prose and after a couple years, I got a writing teacher named Bob Lindsay, a former Marine, whose rule was: one misspelling and your paper gets an automatic F, no ekseptions. After your brilliant writing got a couple of flunks, you learned a basic skill: reading your own elegant prose, word by word. And that made you a copy editor, a skill that lasts a lifetime, one that people are willing to pay money for.

—Garrison Keillor in an essay “What you learn from losing a ballgame.”