Test Ledes -- A Wrap-Up

Happy to see many of you aced your test ledes exercise. Lots of grades of 3.5 or above. Everybody showed the ability to correctly identify and summarize the central points of your stories. Congrats!

The problem that arose here and there came with fatals. Gulp.

Two people fataled parts of the test. Now, the way I graded this assignment minimized the impact of those fatals, as I graded each item separately and then computed a final grade based on the average score. So the fatal only impacted one-third of your grade. It'll leave a bruise, but it won't kill you, grade-wise.

But I need to warn you, most future assignments will receive just a single grade. So ANY fatal can drop your grade on that kind of assignment to zero. Let's avoid that, okay?

And in the spirit of learning lessons from our errors, let's look at the fatals.

One was yet another case of the incorrect word being spelled correctly. In this case, it was "the contagious decease" when you meant to say "contagious disease." Since "decease" is spelled correctly but changes the meaning of the statement, this is a fatal. We've seen this before. It's a very common way of fataling.

Still, it needs to stop. That starts with not simply relying on spell check. That starts with making sure that you read your story line-by-line after you finish writing and before you turn it in, to make sure what you wrote was what you actually intended to write.

The other fatal sank what was otherwise a great lede and nut graf. Let's look at it:

Are no fewer than 12 injuries in the past 20 years enough to end a 100-year tradition? In East Lansing, the answer is yes.

Today, East Lansing Fire Chief Tom Izzo said the city plans to eliminate the "bad" tradition of sliding down a pole . . .

Okay, let's stop there. You put quotes around "bad." Do we put quotes around things that people didn't utter? No, we don't. In general, quotes only go around words that were literally uttered by someone.

Now, I may have let this go if it was clear that the quote marks were intended as a writing device and were not for attribution. But look at the placement. It's in the same sentence as "Izzo said" and therefore can be assumed by the reader to have been uttered by Izzo, Which it was not.

Sorry, folks, but that's a fatal.

I know this can be frustrating. But don't get frustrated. Again, learn from this, apply what you have learned going forward, and make this an issue of yours at the start of your journalism career. That's something many of the folks who preceded you -- myself included -- can relate to, but that we also worked out of our systems through the constant adherence to double-checking work.