Graffiti in Quito, after its gone through the editing process.

An anonymous group of roving editors are making their way through Quito, Ecaudor, wielding the street art equivalent of a red pen.  Calling what they do a “public service and a moral obligation,” Acción Ortografica Quito told Colors Magazine that they’re “against spelling vandalism,” and “won’t break nor give up until we see a society free of spelling mistakes.”

Together since November 2014, the group consists of three men in their thirties; two do the actual corrections, and one handles social media. As they described their process to the Cossimo Bizzarri at the magazine, they start by driving around to take picture of mistakes, then “stop somewhere for a beer to discuss the copyediting at hand,” and, at some point, go back and actually make the corrections. Sometimes the corrections are few and simple, but as the magazine notes, “sometimes the graffiti is simply incomprehensible: Acción Ortografica’s first job had thirteen mistakes in two lines.”

“Somehow, correcting the spelling mistakes in graffiti is a way to take a vandalistic act and put some order in what’s anarchic by nature. It’s a critical act about what’s right and wrong,” they specify. But explaining that to a policeman may be difficult and dangerous: in Quito, anyone caught painting in the streets risks three days of prison and a fine. So, despite claiming that spelling rules should stand above municipal laws, Acción Ortografica schedules its raid for the cover of the night.

The group sprang up as a result of Accion Poetica, a movement that, according to Google Translate, “redefines urban poetry….generally optimistic thoughts of love and phrases, quotations from poets, writers, musicians.” Claiming to want to bring more fun to the streets, and make the city more cosmopolitan, Acción Ortografica “deliberately chose the name so their signature would be both a joke for those who had made the corrected graffiti and a way to mock Acción Poetica, whose murals were also a target of their actions.”

Accion Ortografica is planning to start a hotline for people to complain about grammatically offensive graffiti, and they’ve taken their fight to Twitter.  

The collective has recently expanded its battle from the walls of Quito to Twitter, where they sneaked into existing threads to correct tweets by Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa, who is known, among other things, for having curtailed freedom of speech in the country (Ecuador rates 95th in the World Freedom of Press Index 2014 by NGO Reporters Without Borders). Acción Ortografica clarifies that their act was linguistic, not political.