More Ledes -- Fatals Happen

But we're gonna try to work out bad habits and create good habits to avoid fatals like this one:

After zooming off from the Parsons Funeral Home lot, a thief reported a stolen car to the chief of police . . .

First, the information you had wasn't that the van was stolen from Parsons, but it was a van rented to Parsons stolen from outside the home of a client. Second, the thief didn't call the chief; he called police, and the chief told you about it.

The fatals tell me you perhaps read the material too quickly before you started writing -- and in the process you made assumptions -- and then you failed to adequately fact-check your story after writing it.

Fact-checking is more than just checking names and places and numbers; it's also making sure that they way you interpreted and wrote the story is, in fact, correct.

Here's a fatal that wouldn't have been caught by spell check:

A speeding driver was killed today after loosing control . . .

That's because the word "loosing" was spelled correctly. Problem is, you intended to say "losing." And since the new word you unintentionally used changes the meaning of the sentence, it is a fatal.

Spell check is a help, but it's a complement -- and not a substitute -- to checking a story line-by-line, and word-by-word, with your own eyeballs.