Often, my hands move faster than my ability to ‘check over’ everything does. I’m often hitting the send or a publish button before I really mean to. This just means I have to go back and edit my work/message, or deal with my friends quipping back at me (or me teasing them). In class, one of the focuses on the week was Japanese Internment. The class read the intro to “Miss Breed” (by Joanne Oppenheim), a a collection of letters from interred Japanese children sent to Miss Clara Breed, the Children’s Librarian at the San Diego Public Library from 1929 to 1945.
The introduction to the collection noted that “In reprinting the children’s letters, we have kept the original misspellings, punctuation, and grammatical errors to reflect the full flavor of the authentic letters sent to Clara Breed.” This caught my attention, so while choosing a letter to read, I vaguely glanced through multiple till I found one with an error in the first sentence. This letter was written by Katherine Tasaki. Katherine wrote this letter on New Years eve: thanking Miss Breed for “all the preasents”, and apologizing for “not writting sooner”. While one could have easily changed fixed these errors in transcription, I’m glad they didn’t. I believe keeping the original errors makes things more real. Not only that, but it makes the letters more relatable and personable, gave a personality to the letters besides tone. These kids were young, and in some cases probably just too excited and didn’t have auto-correct on their side like we do now (but I still make mistakes…). Case in point:
The errors in the letter served as an indirect reminder to readers that these were ‘real kids’, real lives, not statistics in a textbook or people the US erased in history.
