When I accepted this job last summer, then-Editor-in-Chief Chris Wilson told me I was free to tackle almost any subject related to The Cavalier Daily. The only things he asked me not to write about were spelling, punctuation and grammar mistakes.
I thought that was a reasonable request. I knew I would have bigger issues to write about this year than a misplaced comma or a misspelled word in the seventh paragraph of an eight-paragraph story. But in the last week and a half, I've received a couple of well-reasoned (and grammatically correct) e-mails about some recent mistakes in The Cavalier Daily.
Every newspaper publishes articles or columns with silly little mistakes that will drive English teachers like my dad crazy. The writers and editors at my hometown paper have no clue how to use a comma and regularly violate rules of grammar I learned in elementary school. The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., which I try to read every day, will occasionally run articles without periods on the ends of some sentences. I've even spotted a misspelled word or two in The New York Times.
When I was the sports editor at North Carolina State University's student paper, I was just as guilty of letting misspelled words and poor punctuation and grammar slip through the editing cracks. I would leave the newsroom at night believing I had thoroughly edited every story. Then I'd open the paper the next day and see one of my writers misspelled the baseball coach's first name, and I missed it.
Few things frustrated me more. If readers were going to criticize me or one of my reporters, I wanted them to talk about an opinion one of us expressed or an editorial decision, not a misspelled name. I did everything I could to prevent those types of mistakes from appearing in print. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't catch all of them.
Imagine a class of 30 students researching, writing and editing a group term paper that's a few thousand words long. At least one spelling, punctuation or grammar mistake would appear in the final draft. Now imagine the term paper has to cover several different topics and the group has just a few hours to write and edit all that copy. That's the situation The Cavalier Daily's staff faces five days a week.
I hope the English majors and professors reading this don't think I'm downplaying the significance of good sentence structure, proper punctuation and perfect spelling. One of the e-mailers spotted typographical mistakes in two articles that affected his ability to understand what happened. Good writers and editors know the correct spelling, punctuation and grammar are crucial to effectively communicating a message. I'm confident The Cavalier Daily's staff understands that.
When I was working on this column, a close friend asked me, "Do you think it's really impossible to publish a perfect paper?" It's difficult to do every day, but editors and reporters should certainly aspire to reach that standard.
Using statistics
A couple of columns seemed to inspire some lively debate in the Letters to the Editor section toward the end of last week. As I've said before, I don't think my job includes agreeing or disagreeing with columnists' opinions. But something mentioned as a fact in one of those columns caught the eye of a reader who brought it to my attention.
In his Wednesday column ("The disease of capitalism," March 23), Zack Fields cited a study from researchers at Johns Hopkins University that estimated 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died since a U.S.-led military coalition invaded Iraq in March 2003. The media has reported that eye-popping number ever since the study appeared in the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet in November. Most of the media reports, however, have lacked some important statistical context.
The study's authors reported they were 95 percent confident based on the data available to them that the actual number of Iraqi civilian deaths falls somewhere between 8,000 and 194,000. Even someone who knows nothing about statistics should realize that's a huge range. The 100,000 estimate could be right, but it could also be way off. At the time The Lancet announced the study's results, the liberal-leaning Brookings Institute reported that it used a different method to calculate the civilian death toll was between 10,000 and 30,000.
I can't fault Fields for using the Johns Hopkins estimate without adding the statistical context because few of the media reports I saw did. On the other hand, this example shows journalists should be more careful about how they report statistics.
Jeremy Ashton can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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