UPDATED: December 21, 2021

A mere two days after my post on factual errors appeared, in my day job I made an error of a different kind. I used a simple catchall phrase to describe a Washington-based interest group. In fact, the organization had a slightly more elevated function, which made my error akin to describing the Supreme Court as a body of federal judges.  

An editor caught my mistake and alerted me to the error of my ways. While I submitted only a draft, my editor was vexed and upset. Did I not check my facts?!

The mistake was a peculiar one. I was familiar with the organization, so much I had been on a first-name basis with its spokesman. Yet I had not written about it recently. Worse, I felt squeezed for time. Checking my description seemed out of the question. Failure has many faces, and mine was to assume my no-nonsense, two-word description was accurate.

I got to thinking. Do other writers and reporters screw up as I had? Sure enough, while re-reading Bethany Crystal’s excellent post on her days as a professional fact-checker I got my answer: Yes, they do. She devised a system to prevent errors like mine. (More on that in a moment).

If journalistic mistakes were medical illnesses, problematic language would be a common malady. Unlike offensive language and outright fabrication, it is not cancer. It is more like a cold or a mild case of the flu.

Reporters may be ignorant of their journalistic illness. Their symptoms may strike them as unremarkable. Perhaps they have not heard editors or read journalism textbooks that discussed sloppy language.  No one is outraged by the illness, and few besides the offended party and editors care. Yet the disease is debilitating and can alienate others. I know all this was true in my case.

The malady can’t be allowed to continue unchecked. It needs a remedy. In the absence of a cure for problematic language, an excellent treatment is Ms. Crystal’s fact-checker approach, which I wrote about last week.

While many writers reread their sentences silently or aloud, she uses external tools and her hands. 

She prints out a story draft and marks it up with multi-colored pens. Unconfirmed facts are for the red pen. Problematic language is for a yellow pen. She highlights unusual phrases or terms. Then, she confirms them with her sources. Accurate descriptions stay. Inaccurate ones go.

Problematic language may persist despite the fact-checker approach, and the approach makes more demands upon the writer than winging it.

Despite being inconvenient in the moment, though, the strategy is better long term. It’s more disciplined and by my lights, effective. Writers are forced to assume their descriptions are unclear, inaccurate, or confusing. They can’t guess.

Yet the cost of the discipline is remarkably cheap … A yellow highlighter. Like the one you had in college! The magical instrument to keep annoyed readers and editors at bay!