When typos attack

Jim Knight, Member of Parliament, keeps a political blog and an online diary and a Facebook page. He updates them all himself, and apparently he's been a little lax about spelling and grammar checks in recent days. On Thursday, he made the following post to his political blog:

"You may have seen reports in the media today about spelling errors on my blog. Good spelling is really important, as is always checking your work. I update my own blog and facebook page, often from my phone when I am on the move. As a result, mistakes do occasionally creep in. In the future, I ‘must do better’ and always check my work."

So why would people be running news stories about an MP's misspellings and typographical errors? What's the big deal?

Oh. Did I forget to mention? Jim Knight is Schools Minister.

The Telegraph's headline: "Education minister's blog littered with spelling mistakes"

The BBC's headline: "Education minister's online typos"

Here is the Telegraph's list of misspelled words found on the blog: maintainence (maintenance); convicned (convinced); curently (currently); similiar (similar); foce (force); pernsioners (pensioners); reccess (recess); archeaological (archeological); acheiving (achieving); and receieved (received).

According to the BBC, "Some of his sentences also had words missing or were otherwise mangled," and they give a few examples, including this:

"In one entry, Mr Knight talks of his pride at steering through Parliament the legislation raising the education or training age to 18.

"He says: 'This is something that Winston Churchill first proposed 100 years when he put forward the idea of raising the age to 17, then another attempt to raise the leaving age after the First and Second World Wars.'"

The BBC also points out, "The heading of Mr Knight's blog includes the verb 'to feedback'."