We Regret the Error, Nancy Gordy

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.

When a mistake is made, some sort of consequence will occur be it regrettably big or so small it may go unnoticed to the writer; however, the outcome will hopefully be a learning experience. "Perhaps this sounds a bit confusing: fear is good, but also bad; mistakes are bad, but also instructive," Craig Silverman, a freelance journalist and author out of Montreal, states. Fear is good due to the way it stimulates one to write with caution in order to be accurate and free of error. Journalists must demonstrate accuracy for it is a key component of journalism. Without accuracy, a journalist is left with a bad reputation, in turn deeply affecting the reputation of who they write for as well.

Mistakes are bad for the obvious reason. Mistakes will negatively affect one's writing and can cause confusion and lack of loyalty if it becomes a continuous problem. Even though most writers go over their work again and again to ensure that there are no errors and often will get a second set of eyes to go over their work as well, mistakes can still go unnoticed.

Journalists must also meet tight deadlines at times, which adds to the probability of mistakes being made. While errors are tough to correct when in print, they are able to be easily corrected when done online. It is simply a matter of being able to identify the error once it has been published and fixing it.

The Edmonton Journal's website on Friday morning had an error in the headline for a story on the shooting at the Chrysler dealership. I have provided a photo of this error above. The writer was obviously racing the clock to get the breaking news story out and wrote "Toe dead..." rather than "Two dead...". This definitely could have caused some confusion at first if the reader was not able to identify the mistake on their own. Thankfully, the error was corrected quite quickly.

I was able to find another error on the Edmonton Journal's website from a story on the same breaking news event (the Chrysler dealership shooting) soon after i discovered the error in the headline. The simple addition of 'at' next to the word 'on' demonstrated another example of a mistake made when under the pressure to get a story out immediately. It read "Police are scouring the scene at on Stony Plain Road after shots rang out just before 8 a.m. Friday."

I was also able to find an article written on the Edmonton Sun's website that contained a very confusing error. The error read "The Afro-inflected pop group has only two records to their name (the first landed them on the cover of Spin magazine in 2008 and declared the masterminds behind the best album of the year. In February of that year.), but it's been enough to win them a growing legion of fans from across the music spectrum." I am completely unsure as to what was meant within the brackets. There is an unfinished sentence at the end in the brackets, followed by a period inside of them, and then a comma on the outside. This needs to be re-written properly. Instead it could read "The Afro-inflected pop group has only two records to their name. The first record landed them on the cover of Spin magazine in 2008 and in February of that year they were declared the masterminds behind the best album of the year." This article was last updated at 11:04 a.m. this morning and has not been touched since then. There's still time to fix the error! Will it get fixed?

As Silverman said, "mistakes are bad, but also instructive." Being able to learn how to write properly and free of error is a very long process that involves making a lot of mistakes. As there are an endless amount of mistakes one can make, the ability to continue to learn from errors can last a life time. Every time a mistake is made, the writer will often learn something new for they wouldn't have made the mistake if they were already aware that it was a mistake in the first place (unless they are just lazy). Nate Kornell, author and assistant professor explains this well by saying that "making errors is the best way to learn information that you want to learn."

Readers will always expect accuracy from journalists and so it is the writer's duty to fulfill this expectation through facts, grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc., and when a mistake is made, it must be excepted as a learning opportunity (that won't need to be repeated).

Note: Image from Edmonton Journal