We said the plaintiffs were seeking $500,00 in damages, and $500.000 in damages, when in fact they were seeking $500,000 in damages.The former number is $50,000 with a misplaced comma (because a five with four zeroes measures tens of thousands; we need five zeroes after a number for it to be hundreds of thousands of dollars), and the middle one is $500 (because anything after the decimal is a measure of cents, not dollars).
We also said there were 11.1 million American households, when in fact there were 113.1 million American households.
Plus, we spelled the last name of the principal both as Ferrell and Ferrel. One has to be wrong, right?
Same thing when we spelled a last name as both Dowdell and Dowdwll.
And we called one of the defendants the school president when in fact he was the school principal.
The
lesson? Same as usual. Make sure we correctly cite spellings of names
and the accuracy of numbers before we start writing, and after we finish
make sure what we wrote checks out with what we intended to write. Go
through your work and make sure you used the same names the same way,
and look for inconsistencies.
One more time: journalism isn't about writing; it's about getting it right.
And that brings us down to one lonely person who has yet to fatal this semester. You know who you are; the rest of you don't.
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