Sleep: With The Fishes

"Sleeping with the fishes" is what a mobster says about someone they've killed. And in this exercise, we have some people who are proverbially fish-sleeping because they fataled. Let's look at some examples:

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PROBLEM: We spelled the researcher's last name as Grant, when in fact it was Gant. A total of six of us made this error!

SOLUTION: You know this one: double-check all spellings of any noun (person, place or thing), statistical unit and quotes to make sure what you wrote is correct.

Plus, this is a situation where if you blindly clicked on every suggested change offered by spell check, you may have inserted an error into the story. That's because Gant isn't a word (it's just a name, which is something spell check generally doesn't check for) that most spell check programs recognize; it would suggest you change it to Grant, which is a word and a name.

If you weren't paying attention and just clicking on all recommended changes, then this may have happened to you. Given the rate of this mistake being made, I strongly suspect it happened more than once or twice.

Just another reason why spell check is a supplement to, but not a substitute for, checking your work with your own eyes, line-by-line, noun-by-noun, number-by-number and and quote-by-quote. 

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PROBLEM: One of us spelled her last name as Gant and Grant, the latter of which is wrong.

SOLUTION: Properly proofreadfing the story using your own eyes would have revealed two spellings for one name, for which at least one has to be wrong. That should have prompted us to then double-check what the correct spelling was in the text, and that would have indicated which spelling was wrong. 

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PROBLEM: One of us spelled her last name as Grant and Grand, both of which are wrong.

SOLUTION: Properly proofreadfing the story using your own eyes would have revealed two spellings for one name, for which at least one has to be wrong. That should have prompted us to then double-check what the correct spelling was in the text, and that would have indicated both spellings were wrong.  

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