Barb Levine-Ritterman and Adam Weber with their victory mugs at WNHH FM.
When Barb Levine-Ritterman sees a stray comma or misspelled word in the New Haven Independent, it feels like a sliver of wood has slipped under the skin of a finger.
That makes us, and our readers, lucky.
“It’s like a splinter,” she said. “If you run across a splinter, you’ve got to fix it.”
Levine-Ritterman fixes many verbal splinters in the Independent. More than 1,000 this year alone. Year after year, she is among the readers who compete to see who can catch the most typos in Independent stories, then send in their finds so we can fix them.
This year she and a new entrant, Adam Weber, have been competing for first place for months. They came to the WNHH FM studio Tuesday to share the hows and whys of their typo-catching methods, during a joint appearance on “Dateline New Haven.”
It turns out they know each other, too: Weber and Levine-Ritterman’s daughter, Maya, were in the same third and fourth-grade story group at Temple Emanuel back in the day.
Both typo-catchers have jobs that require precision: Ritterman-Levine is a software designer who helps people solve work-flow problems through MicroServ, a company she has run in New Haven since 1984. (Years before that, she served as membership coordinator at the old New Haven Food Co-op on Whalley Avenue.) Weber is an engineer; he has worked for the city for the past year, including on neighborhood corridor traffic-calming projects.
He’s also a brilliant Tik-Tok video creator, with over 100,000 followers. Check out the video he made about his New Haven day job; chances are it’ll be the most fun minute you spend starting at a screen in ages.
Levine-Ritterman caught the grammar and punctuation bug in Harold Mawrocki’s sixth-grade English class in Pittsburgh, where she grew up. Today she teaches English to immigrants through Literacy Volunteers.
Weber traced his spelling-grammar bug to coming across the book Eats, Shoots & Leaves during middle school in Milford.
They and their fellow typo-catchers arre esssential members of teh Independent community. Follow the competition and submit your own caught typos here. We appreciate the (needed) help so much!
Click on the above video to watch the full interview with typo-catcher titans Barb Levine-Ritterman and Adam Weber on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”
Wait a minute.... I didn't know there was a competition..... I'm in for 2022!!! Where do we sign up?