OOC #2: Fatal Problems

Here's a new one: there was one fataled original version of the out-of-class stories, but THREE on rewrite!

Here's what went wrong.

First, in one story we wrote about Tibb's Brewing Co., when in fact it's spelled Tibbs Brewing Co. We failed to fix the fatal in the rewrite, so the 1.0 stands.

Second, in quote we wrote something was in "hock," when we meant in "shock." Any misspelling in a quote is a fatal, especially one that  changes the meaning of the quote.

It's also something spell check wouldn't have caught, since hock (verb; to pawn) and shock (reaction to trauma) are both real words.

In the same story, we also identified MLive.com News as MLive.com New, when the latter is wrong. A misspelling of a formal title is also a fatal.

Neither of those fatals were in the original story.

Third, we spelled a last name as both Gray and Grey. A thorough proofreading would have revealed the dual spellings, one of which obviously has to be wrong since people only have one spelling for their last names.

Again, this fatal was not in the original story.

And actually, the latter two fatalers were kind of lucky: when someone fatals on a rewrite when they did not fatal on the original, I don't average the grade between the original and rewrite; I simply revert the grade to that of the original, which is higher than the average.

Still, it's not good, folks. One more time: journalism isn't about writing; it's about getting it right. We should have this down pat by this stage of the semester.