This is troubling; at this point of the semester, we should be seeing fatals fade away. Instead, on an assignment which is critical to your final grade, we had a spate of fatals.
In one quote, we said something was pervious when we meant to say previous. This is both a quote with a misspelling and a misspelling that creates a change in meaning, both of which are grounds for a fatal.
In another instance, when we meant to say "... who asked you?" came flying toward her, we extended the quote marks like this: "... who asked you came flying toward her." Adding the non-quote segment inside of quote marks creates a misquote, which is a fatal.
Also, we spelled one person's last name alternately as Bivens and Biven's. A last name has only one spelling; so having two spellings is a fatal.
In one quote, we misspelled "me" as "em." In another, "home" became "hoe." Those are misspellings that change the meanings of quotes, and thus they are fatals.
The shame of it is, these were all really nicely-written stories. For each person, I'd argue it was close to their best work of the semester, if not THE best.
But in journalism, if we don't get things right, it doesn't matter. Any mistakes make what we have of less use to readers. It makes our work less trustworthy. It erodes our credibility.
We've gone through proofreading strategies all summer, but they won't work if we don't religiously adhere to 'em.
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