J4450: The Importance of Being Accurate

I can’t say that I learned the importance of accuracy checks the hard way – because that would make this seem too melodramatic. However, I think the story I worked on today offered me a good lesson on the significance of writing clear, non-confusing sentences.

For my first story, about a lecture that serves as an unofficial kickoff to a new campus civility campaign, one sentence in particular gave me some trouble. I knew what I wanted to say (the source had been clear), but I was having trouble putting it in print.

The rough draft of the sentence went something like this: Each group gets to create its own event that they want to host in order to promote civility on campus.

Kind of confusing, plus any sense of flow is absent. And it didn’t really get better when I went to editing. I think my editor and I worked on the structure of that sentence the most during our session.

After editing, I got the opportunity to call the source back and verify the information I had. I stumbled over the sentence, knowing it sounded bad. The source quickly corrected that.

The published sentence is in part this: “Participating groups will work to implement their own, different activities and events in the spirit of the Show Me Respect campaign.”

Better, no?

Without the accuracy check, the sentence would not have been as clear to readers (and me).

Here’s the link to the story, “MU launches civility campaign.”