November 5 marked the completion of five years of Guardian corrections and clarifications. There were the usual celebrations throughout the land, but perhaps they were misplaced. There is no diminution in the number of errors. The corrections column itself added 17 to the total. “Are you being swamped? Get a grip,” a reader advised.
Since we started five years ago almost 37,000 of you have contacted my office and we have, as a result, carried more than 7,100 items in the corrections column. The ratio, in fact, is roughly five calls to one correction. This year the calls took a sudden leap to 10,232. The number of corrections reached the record level of 1,570 – a ratio of 6.5 calls to one correction.
That does not look so good. However, it is not quite as bad as it looks. The total number of calls includes the 800 or so emails sent to me when I was writing about the Guardian’s Middle East coverage. Many columns attract multiple comment, and many errors now attract multiple complaint.
The scream from my assistant’s desk a few days ago turned out to be nothing more than the arrival of the 10,000th complaint this year (this correcting year, that is). The email came from John Parker in Kernow (Cornwall). In fact his was a two-part complaint. The first part was about a clue in the crossword (I have developed a superstitious phobia for this word, fearing that at its mere mention they will rise again).
The second part was questioning the spelling of artefact as artifact. Quite rightly. We prefer artefact, and artefact is what should appear in the Guardian since, in the absence of a note in the house style guide, journalists are referred to Collins. That, like the Oxford, describes artifact as a variant of artefact, without further comment or sanction.
This is all beside the point. I sent the following email: “John, it might interest you to know that this email from you was the 10,000th complaint to reach my desk this year. I’d like to mark the occasion by sending you a copy of my new book, More Corrections & Clarifications, a collection of my columns and some of the funnier corrections … If I could be sure I had your complete address I would be sending you a copy of the book whether you wanted it or not.”
“Dear Ian, I very much look forward to receiving a copy of your book … I am an inveterate armchair corrector myself of misprints but usually I cannot be bothered to take action.” There follows what seems to be an attempt at ingratiation after the fact. “Keep up the good work – that’s a grand job you’re doing, and your column is one of the pieces I always make time to read sooner or later [my italics] in the week!”
Almost simultaneously, I received the following from a publisher: “I have been meaning to write for a very long time about the poor quality of proof-reading in the Guardian. Your homophone corner is very entertaining, but every single day there seem to be several elementary errors in the paper. Today, without looking too hard, I find [someone] saying, about magazines, ‘I pour over them.’ The other day we had ‘bi-products’ …”
He adds: “I suppose it is to do with the speed at which the paper is passed through the editorial process, but it really isn’t very impressive. My colleague in the office, another long-term Guardian reader, feels exactly the same way.”
What can I say? Last week I did a number of radio interviews in connection with the new book of columns and corrections. I think all the interviewers mentioned the paper’s Grauniad reputation for misprints. I was able to reassure them that the reputation appeared to me to be quite secure.
The spelling check now available at the touch of a key is not the answer. I see it as part of the problem. It would not have saved us from this: “In a piece headed The perils of loyalty … we referred to ‘the moral satin of Clinton’s career’. That should have read ‘the moral stain’ etc.” Or from this, after we had described the subject of an obituary as “a journalist and fly-fishing enthusiast … [whose] pastimes included typing files.” As the correc tion said, “he much preferred tying flies, of course”.
Where, I hear you ask, was the intelligent human eye? It was there but it blinked. There is no doubt that proof-reading standards could be improved. Your continuing complaints about these things maintain the pressure to do so. However, let us keep a sense of proportion. On its worst day the corrections column is a coracle in the Atlantic. An unblemished newspaper is an oxymoron.
