I've heard that people mostly flip through the portfolios. However a friend of mine was one of the students at UMichigan's grad program that reviewed portfolios for admissions and he told me that he would always read the text because he did have the time and he wanted to give everyone a fair chance to present themselves. So I guess some do. And I'm sure some don't.

What kind of effect would a spelling error or two make? Was this ever mentioned. Did reading the text ever change his mind.

The mistakes aren't in the titles but in the blocks of text. I have a fairly significant amount of text where I felt it was important. However some pages don't have any text. I've been working on my portfolio for several years off and on. I tried to pay attention to every little detail so it just sucks now that I found those mistakes after I already sent them out. It makes me worry even more about getting accepted. As you said it may make me look a little careless or sloppy which I didn't want

i have heard about the grad students doing the first fun through...
knowing some of my friends who have done that, some really cared about the text...others didn't.

but the ones that did...if they saw a typo...to them it said "i didn't care enough to reread this...so why should you." needless to say, they did not make it past the first cut.

Honestly, I have seen Zaha competition boards that contained not just typos but the possessive of "it" spelled repeatedly with an apostrophe.

Don't worry about it - there's a good chance that if it is being looked at by studio professors, they will not notice.

Well isn't that great to know. Still can't believe I did that. Maybe they could think that it gives my portfolio character or personality, or maybe not.

Basically, you should hope that nobody sees them. It probably won't make the difference between acceptence or not but I've always had the collective impression that typos in professional or official writing are pretty tacky.

Coming off a stint in school, everyone has a tendency to be super loquacious. This seems to develop out of an irrational fear of being misunderstood by others and especially critics (GSD has a list of examples in the hundreds more or less about this phenomenon). Some of us think highly of our writing skills which only makes this worse. This stuff really has no place in a portfolio in my opinion.

Basically, like others have said, the normal way to handle a portfolio is to flip it. It's like how you're supposed to hold a hammer at the opposite end from the metal head, you flip portfolios. With that in mind, treat your words like one would treat breaths of air in a flooding submarine.

But, like the guide says, don't panic.

Any thoughts on if requesting the portfolio be sent back or sending a revised one would be good idea. Seems to me that it may not be the best. Thoughts?

I would say just take a deep breath and try to let it go. You probably don't want to send a revised copy. These commitees will understand that portfolios are often made in haste.

Check out Content. There are a few typos in there.

if they like it, they'll like it regardless of the spelling mistakes.
if they don't, no ammount of spell checking is gonna help you!

I know typos happen but I don't want that to be what makes the difference. I'm still hoping that typos translate into character.

I hope that this is a lesson for us all.

I had a bunch of people to look at my portoflio.
I asked:
-Professors that participate in Admission Committees
-Students at the schools I am applying
-English Professors
-Family

I was amazed the only people that caught typos were students of architecture at the schools I am applying. They noticed little, minute things that I didnt notice. Seems like architecture students are pretty acute at looking at details. I am more affraid of the student representatives that most schools have look at portfolios than professors. Students are always rougher than professors.

You know that brings up a good point. I actually had a professor look over it and keep it for two weeks. We even had several discussions and I'm guessing that he didn't actually read it after all. I also showed it to another professor a time or two and she never even attempted to read any of it. However, when students have looked through it they seem to at least skim through the text not sure why though. I also had a non-architecture friend attempt to read through it but that didn't work.

Yeah, don't ask for them back or send a revised version.

Jumpy ...?? ... speechless ?? .. haha .. kidding

Not sure what happened, I guess I deleted my entry?