Most folks did pretty well in this assignment. Some grafs were too long (some people need to hit the "return" key more often and make shorter grafs) and too many people need to remember to double-space your work so I can fit comments in the margins.
Unfortunately in this exercise, we did have some fact fatals. Three, to be exact.
In one, we wrote a very nice story that had a solid lede and gerat fact organization. But in the nut graf, we said that the board policy permits boys from playing on girls' teams. In fact, the policy prevents such an action.
The incorrect word -- which spell check wouldn't have caught, because it is an unintended word that happens to be spelled correctly -- changes the meaning of the sentence in question, and therefore is a fatal.
In a second case, we referred to the school district as that of Lansing. In fact, it was East Lansing. The two are not the same, and so this also changes the meaning of the story and is a fatal.
In a third case, we misspelled the name of Jane Tribitt as Tribett. Misspelling a name is a fatal.
Now, do fatals suck? Yes, they do. You automatically get a 1.0 on the assignment, no matter how well you did otherwise.
That's so we can emphasize how the root of journalism isn't writing, it's getting it right. There is no such thing as getting a "little" thing wrong, as any error mars our credibility.
The good news is, practice story assignments like this one make up just over one percent of your final grade. And that's by design, so we can build good fact-checking habits into our routines so that when we get to much higher-weight assignments like the out-of-class stories, we've identified our bad habits and worked them out of our systems with the practice stories.
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