Canon to right of them

A bad week in spelling -- more broadly, in "having somebody look at the stuff before you print it" -- is coming to a painful end downtown:

Tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman, the 2014 artist-in-residence, exploded out of the gate as if shot out of a canon in his inaugural set at Cadillac Square in the heart of downtown.

OK, maybe everyone was blinded by the explosion of good writering, which only gets gooder as it proceeds:

Beyond the music tonight, there was a noticeable change in the city’s psyche. The last year has not been easy for Detroit. The city’s bankruptcy has produced a hornet’s nest of conflict and pain, creating a thick fog of civic angst that has sometimes made it hard to remember the undeniable seeds of the city’s rebirth.

... but enough evidence has piled up over the past few days to call for a reminder of the Basic Rule of spellering: If you don't know how to spell a word, look it up. If you think you do, look it up anyway. As in this from Thursday:

For millions of children across the country, walking alone to school is a right of passage.

Wrong write. You want a ritual of passage, not some sort of entitlement to passage. And the online hed is too good to overlook:

 

And there's this from a 1A feature on Monday -- now fixed online, though the transposition bumble in the second graf remains:

Sanders bounced back from near-oblivion to a become growing national player in desserts and candy.


The con- fectioner, also known for its ice cream and hot fudge topping, has seen double-digit sales growth over the last three years, fueled in part by native Michiganders buying the products they remember from their childhoods, said company President Ron Rapson, who said annual sales are about $25 million.

Pick on spelling with care; the only sure result of catching an error is committing one yourself in the booking process. But this much negligence in this many prominent places in a couple of days suggests a flaw in the machine. If you don't take the finished product seriously, you shouldn't expect your readers to.