English: To err really is human

Among the more comical mistakes published in the Star recently was a typo that transposed two letters in a word to turn the “marital bed” into the “martial bed.”

Many readers wondered if there was some sort of Freudian slip in misspelling “marital” as “martial” in the first paragraph of a Jan 18 article about the perils of adultery in the marriage bed.

“The bed they practised their martial arts in? Bed for a court martial? I can't believe an editor let THAT one slip by!” commented W.J.R. Halyn.

Why do journalists make such silly mistakes? How indeed does an error that jumps out at readers slip through the Star’s editing process?

In search of greater insight and understanding into these persistent reader questions, I turned to two recently published books that delve deeply into the psychology and philosophy of our innate fallibility: Why We Make Mistakes, by Joseph T. Hallinan, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, and Being Wrong, by Kathryn Schulz, also an award-winning journalist.

Though neither of these journalists writes specifically about media errors, their compelling insights into the nature of human error help explain how mistakes are made and why being wrong is inevitable in any endeavour in which mere mortals are involved.

Journalists are well aware that typos, grammar gaffes, misspellings and inaccuracies mar a news organization’s credibility and annoy its readers. I know that most writers take great care to double-check their work and editors aim to catch errors before they are published.

But, who among us — journalist or reader — has not had the experience of checking our work and missing our mistakes?

Hallinan, a former writer for the Wall Street Journal, tells us this is the human condition. His cites research indicating that even the most careful readers do not read every single letter, in every single word, in every single sentence.

That reality helps explains an error in his former newspaper that referred to a competition of British jesters who would be riding on unicorns. In fact, as the Journal’s subsequent correction noted, the clowns were to ride unicycles.

“For anyone interested in mistakes, the corrections columns of newspapers often make delicious reading,” he notes.

Unicorn, unicycle, marital, martial. All too often, it is all the same to the human eye.

“It’s tempting to attribute mistakes like this to simple carelessness,” Hallinan writes. The reality is more complex however. Most people skim and miss some details.

And, he adds, “the more skilled we are, the more likely we are to skim.” That explains why even highly skilled editors miss mistakes.

“We see only what we expect to see,” Hallinan says. “Overlooked mistakes are so common that researchers have given them their own designation: they are called ‘proofreader’s errors’

“These humdrum errors reveal some interesting quirks about the way human perception works. Perception, above all, is economical. We notice some things and not others.”

As well, as something becomes more familiar we tend to notice less, not more and “we come to see things not as they are but as (we assume) they ought to be.

“We are blinded by the effects of habit and hubris and hobbled by a poor understanding of our own limitations. We don’t see all that we observe, and yet we sometimes ‘see’ things we don’t know we’ve seen.”

Schulz expresses a similar idea about how we look but do not see in Being Wrong, an engaging philosophical examination of the inevitability of human error.

“To be blind without realizing our blindness is, figuratively the situation all of us are in when we are in error,” she writes.

If this is so, should we simply give up and accept the inevitability of what readers perceive to be journalistic carelessness?

Of course not. While typos rooted in human error may indeed be somewhat inevitable in any publication, we can aim to minimize them. Both of these writers contend we must understand our innate fallibility to devise better methods to see clearly and catch our mistakes.

“It helps to second-guess, to play devil’s advocate with yourself,” Hallinan writes. “We all think we are above average. In this conceit lies the seeds of many mistakes.”

Hallinan points to professions such a pilots and anesthesiologists that have minimized life-threatening “human error” by devising checklists that acknowledge the possibility of mistakes and enhance awareness of what can go wrong.

Similar measures in newsrooms include accuracy checklists and production systems that assure all copy is read over by fresh eyes before publication. The reality is that such measures are often skipped in the rush to deadline and mistakes make it into print.

To minimize human error, Schulz suggests we need to be humble and know that what can go wrong often will go wrong: “If we want to try to eradicate error, we have to start by assuming that it is inevitable.”

Indeed, mistakes happen.

publiced@thestar.ca