While the world continues to heap praise on the iPad, it’s time to address a persistent problem: The typo. This is the tablet’s dirty, little secret: What we gain in ease, portability and sheer dazzle, we lose in time spent correcting half-baked and non-existent words.

My own tendency, for instance, is to sprinkle pesky n’s randomly throughout my documents.  

Why? Because the letter hovers directly over the space bar.

As a result, my attempts to separate words often lead to the exact opposite ”“ conjoinment by n’s.

Part of the problem is inevitable. As any tablet user knows, there’s a learning curve that flusters all typists, especially those skilled at “touch-typing.” All of us rely, in part, on the topography of the keyboard with its banks, edges and slopes, and the deep valleys between keys. Each key is discrete and obvious.

The iPad offers no such landscape. Its keyboard is a swath of flatness with no tactile clues for finger placement ”“ like Braille without the texture. Suddenly one’s fingers are wandering in a wilderness that’s fully notated, only the language is foreign.

Factor in that the standard keyboard has been pruned to fit the iPad’s smaller terrain, so that symbols and numerals require toggling between alternating keyboards. Then add an auto-correction system that, according to the User Guide, “corrects misspellings (and) predicts what you’re typing,” and it’s a recipe for disaster.

No longer can we charge ahead, eyes on the screen, swiftly transposing thoughts into words. Instead we have to micromanage our errant hands, watching a ballet gone bad, fingers stumbling on a stage filled with obstacles.  

As one user puts it, “I spend an inordinate amount of time correcting the decidedly non-helpful, non-intuitive corrections.”

Indeed, the iPad is a lousy mind-reader.

Over time, users acclimate to the two-dimensional keyboard, and we find ourselves making typos of various sorts. Among them is the common typo, the adjacent key one strikes by accident. But we’re primed for that, since it’s the kind of typo we’ve always made, on every device. It’s the other extreme, when typos are all but indecipherable, that’s so irksome. Sometimes I type entire words on the wrong row of letters, thus creating wholly wrong words ”“ or fabricating wholly new ones.

Which begs the definition of a typo: Like a head cold that morphs into the flu, when is a jumble of typos something else?

So we resign ourselves to the heavy load of editing that the iPad often requires, and get on with things.

Stranger, still, is the migration of this dubious new skill to conventional keyboards. As I make peace with typing on the iPad, I find more typos cropping up when I use a standard laptop.

What gives?

I put this question to several tablet users.

“Now that you’ve mentioned it, (and I just had to re-type the word ”˜mention’ three times!), perhaps that’s happening to me, as well!” a friend writes.

Another says, “I hate typing on the iPad.”

In the end, my typing skills, which have served me well for decades, have been upended in the name of progress. Since acquiring the iPad, I’ve gained a knack for bountiful errors ”“ on all keyboards ”“ which seems to come with the territory. Somehow I doubt that Apple, a company known for its user-friendly products, planned on this comedy of errors.

— Joan Silverman writes op-eds, essays and book reviews. An abridged version of this article originally ran in The Maine Sunday Telegram.