Yikes! I misspelled receive in an email to members of a committee I serve on. Thank goodness they are gardeners and not grammarians, and so far have been too polite to point out my mistake.

But it’s made me ponder the fast-paced world of email, and how the number of messages seems to be expanding exponentially. We write, we read, we respond all at lightning speed. We monitor email close to 24/7, via iPhones, BlackBerries, laptops. There’s little time anymore for thoughtful, well constructed, correctly punctuated and spelled emails. Instead, the pressure is on to respond quickly to those messages in our in boxes before we become overtaken by unread emails. And, of course, we churn out new emails to others, thus keeping them as frantic as we are.

Does it matter that a professional editor, in her haste to conduct personal business and finish a task, misspelled a word? It wasn’t that I didn’t know the correct spelling, and I noticed the mistake myself the next day. Still, it’s troublesome. For years my training and profession has pushed me to be exact and precise. Now years of discipline are being challenged.

I think too of my daughter, who from a very young age was a voracious reader but even now in graduate school is a terrible speller. When she was in eighth grade her English teacher tried to ease her father’s and my concern by suggesting that spell check was the answer. We were skeptical.

I suppose misspelling a word is not worth agonizing over—or angsting, as my colleague Cathy likes to say. It’s not as if anyone were harmed by my mistake. And the email went to only a few, apparently forgiving, people.

Maybe the answer is to slow down—and remember to spell check. Or maybe it’s to move on quickly and don’t sweat the small stuff. That could be a life-changing experience.