Speech: Fatals

PROBLEM: In a quote we said perfect when we meant percent. That misspelling not only is an automatic fatal since it was inside of a quote; it would have been a fatal as well outside of a quote, since it changes the meaning of whatever sentence it's in.

SOLUTION: Spell check would do us no good here, since the misspelled word created a correctly-spelled but unintended word. One more time: spell check is a supplement to -- but not a substitute for -- checking every noun, every statistical unit, every title, every location and every word of each and every quote with your own eyes.

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PROBLEM: In another story inside of a quote we left out the word the. In another quote, we left out the word a. Those are fatals; inside of quote marks we cannot drop words.

SOLUTION: Like we do with facts, figures and names, when finished writing review each quote used word-for-word against your notes to make sure you didn't unintentionally drop a word.

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PROBLEM: In one story we spelled East Lansing as East Lansingd, with a random "d" at the end.

SOLUTION: Do I really need to offer one? We know this; we need to actually and thoroughly do this.

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For those of you keeping track of Fatals Club membership, we're up to 14 of 15 folks here. One to go.

For stat geeks, the average number of fatals per student is just over 2. The range is 0 to 4, which I don't find excessive for this point in the semester.

But in past semesters, I've usually seen fatals basically start to disappear in the second half. So for us to remain around the averages I've seen in past classes, we have to do the same.