Correctness 102

This is the second of two posts about my second rule of good writing: being correct. Part one was the last post, and rule 1 was two posts ago.

First this, from Looks Good on Paper:

If you know what a mobius strip is, you should be able to tell that this isn’t one! (I confess, it was the first thing I checked.)

The artist did this on purpose because he liked this look better, but if you’re explaining, get the facts right.

This kind of correctness is crucial: getting the facts right. Sometimes it’s tempting to guess, use hearsay, dramatize, exaggerate, or distort (like the comic); especially if what you write won’t affect you adversely if it’s wrong. But what about your integrity? Expository writers are responsible to tell the truth. And don’t make excuses like “nobody’s perfect.”

We lost the Mars Climate Orbiter because someone mixed metric and English units in the programming. Remember the play The Importance of being Earnest? (Spoiler:) The guy ended up changing his name to Earnest so it would be correct. How would you like the tires on a Boeing 767 fail on landing because the guy who wrote the maintenance manual accidentally reversed the digits in the tire pressure specification? Do you expect your bank to get the numbers in your account wrong? How about your credit score? The gist of that article is that credit reporting agencies don’t care as much as they ought about getting people’s histories right. Here are a few lines to get you started:

…It took me more than a dozen phone calls, the handiwork of a county court clerk and six weeks to solve the problem. And that was only after I contacted the company’s communications department as a journalist … According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, all credit-reporting agencies, are the three most-complained-about companies in America … since 2012, according to the bureau, there have been more than 158,000 complaints against the three agencies, 80 percent of which were about incorrect information on credit reports.

Indifference to being correct is unconscionable. True, nobody is perfect, but that’s not an excuse—it’s a call to action! Here are two ways to make sure you get the facts right:

• Make someone who knows the facts check the writing. If not a human, check the source info. This, by the way, is why the people we call bean counters are so valuable. They like to check stuff.
• Have someone who doesn’t know the facts try out your writing. This applies mainly to instructions. Have someone do what you wrote. If they goof, fix the writing.

Better hope they got the tire pressure right on that 767 when you land in Hawaii, eh?

PS. I ran into this “correct” mobius strip in Prickly City recently.