Sleep: More Fatals

Overall, most people did a great job on the sleep exercise. Lotsa good ledes, lotsa scores in the high 3's.

And a few more people would have also scored very well if not for a creeping fatal here and there.

For example, remember when I urged you to be sure to check your story line-by-line and not just rely on spell check to find errors for you?

Well, that advice would have come in handy as one of us used this quote:

"First, you need someplace that's dark a quiet."

Problem is, the quote should have read, "First, you need some place that's dark and quiet." (Italics mine.)

Dark and quiet, not dark a quiet. Any changed words within a quote is a fatal.

And no, spell check wouldn't have caught the misspelled word, because the misspelling created an unintended word that was correctly spelled.

In another case, you spelled the professor's last name alternately as Gant and Gait. First, we should have caught the inconsistency after we finished writing and while we were fact-checking our story one last time. And second, spell check wouldn't have caught this either, since "gait" is a real word.

A third person did the same, in offering Gant and Grant. Same thing. And "grant" is a real word, too.

And a fourth person referred to people not getting enough sleep during a 24 day. What you meant is a 24-hour day. And a 24 day is a fatal. No, spell check was of no help, since nothing was misspelled at all. You simply left out a word that changed a fact.

Folks, it's not enough to make sure you carefully go over your material before you start writing. And it's not enough to simply run spell check and think you're good. And it's NEVER good to assume everything we meant to type was actually typed correctly.

Give yourself a few minutes before your deadline. Go through your story word-for-word. Stop at names and dates and titles and addresses and data sets like numbers and times and such. Make sure you check what you write against your notes and what you intended to write. Make sure there's agreement between what's on the screen and what's in your head.

And only then do you file your story.