Editing Detective, Tyler Grant

As one sifts through article after article on the internet, he is bound to come across a mistake or two. From time to time, coming across a mistake leads me to find what I’m reading to be less credible. Granted, this usually only happens on personal blogs, or other pieces of writing where it’s blatant the self-editor has been at work.

Once in a while though, the big-shots miss something. If an error gets into print on a major news site, it’s a little surprising. It’s also nice to see that even the most learned make mistakes. On March 29th, I was reading an article from the nydailynews.com that was about a poor girl who killed herself after being tormented by her classmates. She was the new girl who came from Ireland. People despised her for being pretty, and dating a popular guy. Jealousy got in the way of this teen being allowed to live her life. As sad as it is, the writer of the article made a mistake in how the girl died.

I almost feel guilty for pointing out this mistake, but it's still a mistake. Helen Kennedy wrote that, "Phoebe walked into her house and hung herself in a stairwell." To most, this sentence would seem fine, but to those who know, it isn't. We use "hang" for clothes and objects, but for people, we use the word "hanged."

At least the second mistake I discovered won't make me feel as bad for for writing about it. In fact, it makes me feel the opposite. Why? Well, it's because the mistake is on the BBC website. Yes, I've managed to catch those in the upper echelons of journalism with a mistake in their print. It was on March28th, 2010. On Paul Mason's Idle Scrawl blog titled Angry America: why an oil-man's scenario worries me, he writes about where he feels the future of US politics is heading. The main problem is that he write this sentence: "But Obama's project for America seems to have frightened large demographic slice of the population which did not vote for it." Had it been me who'd written that, I would've made sure I'd written it like this: ... to have frightened a large demographic slice... .

Nancy Gordy, a journalism student from MacEwan University, said in her We Regret The Error, "If you make a mistake once, you will seldom make the same mistake again. At least this is what any journalist would and should expect to be the case."

Maybe, Nancy and I can point out the mistakes to Ms. Kennedy and Mr. Mason, so they won't make them again.

Photo courtesy of: Amal