On Mistakes
Or, in the Immortal Words of Bob Ross . . .
Happy accidents.
Today’s Shelf Life is about mistakes. Now: You may think that, as an editor, I hate mistakes. That mistakes are my natural enemy. This could not be further from the truth. I love mistakes. In fact, some of my best friends are mistakes.
For what it’s worth, this is not a new topic for me or Shelf Life. I have written about this before, specifically in Enemy of the Good, which was one of my better ones if I can say so myself.
Alexander Pope originally said, “to err is human” (continued: “to forgive divine”). This is the kind of thing you learn if you go to college for English. People used to ask me what was I going to do with an English degree but, look, it’s twenty years later and I’m using the knowledge I acquired there right now. Pope was astonishingly quotable. More quotable than readable.
But he was right, making mistakes is a normal human activity. All people make mistakes. Any endeavor that involves human beings is vulnerable to the effects of mistakes. Attempting to eliminate mistakes from a product or process is folly. To try might even be said to be . . . a mistake.
Let me begin again: I’m an editor and my job is to find mistakes and fix them. Well, that’s part of my job as an editor. Note: Not all editors are the kinds of editors who have “find and fix mistakes” in their job description; but I am one of that kind.
It’s not the biggest part of my job. There was a time when that was a bigger part of my job than it is now. But even when you’re a hands-on copyeditor or production editor doing in-detail editorial work, finding and fixing all the mistakes is still not the only or biggest aspect of the job.
I say this because sometimes someone will say to me: “I was reading this book the other day and I saw a typo! Isn’t that crazy? Didn’t anyone edit this book?” If you bought it in a big-box bookstore then, yes, chances are someone edited that book. Probably a lot of someones along the way. In spite of everyone’s best efforts, however, we are people—so sometimes there will be mistakes.
Likewise people say to me often, in various ways, “What if we eliminate print? Wouldn’t that save so much money?” The answer is that printing and shipping product are some of the smallest costs associated with bringing a publication to market and in many cases we’d lose money if we eliminated print rather than the other way round. But thanks for looking out, though. Part of continuous process improvement is asking those questions.
If people make mistakes, wouldn’t it be better to eliminate people in favor of editing by AI or at least like some kind of very sophisticated version of Clippy the Paperclip Office Assistant? In fact, many publishers are using some type of AI- or algorithm-assisted editing to take a first pass at manuscript before turning the copy over to a real person to read and refine. It does make sense to offload the grunt work of editing to a learned machine (that’s learnèd, with a grave accent, in case it was not apparent from context).
Twenty years ago I was already doing some variation on this with a master set of custom Word macros I executed on every fresh manuscript to handle a lot of the tedious minutiae you don’t really need a human to deal with. Removing extra spaces at the end of a sentence (one space is correct, I regret to inform some of you); changing out straight quotes (like this ″) for curly or “smart” quotes (like this ”), changing out the ellipsis character for three spaced periods, and so on.
I’m not saying editors can’t be replaced by sufficiently sophisticated AI, because I’m not that prideful. I think for the right price, many individuals and companies would be willing to give up human editing in favor of machine editing.
But anyway, mistakes.
Humans are prone to a cognitive process called the self-serving bias that is, in effect, the belief that:
Our own successes are due to internal factors, like our hard work or careful attention to detail.
Our own failures are due to external factors, things beyond our control.
For instance, if I play a roller derby bout and absolutely crush it, I will likely believe my performance was due to how hard I’ve been working and practicing. But if I play a roller derby bout and get absolutely crushed, I might believe that it’s not because I didn’t work or practice hard enough but because the other team’s skaters had some unfair advantage (eg, “they were more used to skating on this type of surface than I was!” or “the referees favored them”).
Humans are also prone to another cognitive process called the actor–observer bias, or the belief that:
Our own actions in a given situation are chosen depending upon the situation we’re in; whereas
Others’ actions are a product of their personality rather than the situation they’re in.
To give an example: If I am reading a text and I overlook an error that is later brought to my attention, I might justify my miss to myself (or others) by saying something like:
I had too much work on my plate at the time.
I wasn’t given good enough instructions for this task.
The text was so messy and I caught so many things, I couldn’t catch them all.
Whereas if I gave a text to another colleague to read and I noticed later they overlooked an error, I might think:
They always rush through work like this and are careless.
Maybe they don’t have great attention to detail.
This person is just not a very good proofreader.
But if I were to ask my colleague, “hey why do you think you missed this error?” They would probably tell me something like “I had too much work on my plate at the time; I wasn’t given—” you get it.
People are more likely to attribute our own mistakes to factors outside our control while attributing others’ mistakes to their carelessness.
In reality it’s this weird mix of both and also neither at the same time, I think. In reality: Could any one of us turn up the carefulness like 1 percent? Yes, probably. Probably, no one is at 100 percent carefulness 100 percent of the time. Impossible. (See Burnout.) Is it reasonable to say that when someone makes a mistake they should have been more careful, so as not to have made this mistake? No. Maybe they were being as careful as it’s possible to be and the mistake still happened. That does happen.
If someone has made a mistake, could that mistake have been avoided with more care? Maybe. Likewise, any time I make a mistake (I make a lot), I could also avoid the mistake by being more careful. However, I’m more likely to cut myself a bit of slack by attributing my mistake to external factors. Likewise, anyone else who makes a mistake also, likely, had external factors going on that contributed to their mistake.
Mistakes are going to happen if humans are involved and it’s best to remind yourself, when someone else makes one, that their mistake was very likely situational and not down to a character flaw they have.
I don’t believe people are innately careless.
I’m sure some people read the above line and thought: “No, I definitely know some people who are innately careless.”
I still don’t believe it. I’ve encountered people who seemed to me to be careless about things; but I also know that I sometimes exhibit behavior that seems careless to them. Yet, I know I’m an inherently, fundamentally careful person. I’m an editor. If someone else could view me as a person whose behavior seems careless then, surely, if I view someone else as a person whose behavior is careless, it must be possible that they are not in fact careless but just that
their carefulness does not look exactly the same as my carefulness.
I set that part off because it’s really important.
I have ADHD. I was diagnosed well into adulthood and in hindsight it explains some behaviors I have that really look like carelessness. For instance, both my mother (happy Mother’s Day by the way) and my partner have both lamented how I will get dishes almost all the way to where they belong and then lose the thread. Like I’ll carry a glass all the way through the house to the kitchen and then set it down next to the sink instead of putting it in the dishwasher. This drives them absolutely bananas and I understand why it does.
What’s actually happening is I get to the kitchen with the glass in my hand and I say, “Oh shoot the dog’s water bowl is empty” and I put down the glass so I can reach for the dog’s water bowl and when the glass leaves my hand it ceases to exist in my mind. Then I put the dog’s water bowl down and I’m like, “Oh look the paper towel holder is empty.” And then I end up doing ten things around the kitchen, none of which are putting my glass in the dishwasher, but by then I am late for a meeting. Also I probably intended to get a cup of coffee and never did that.
In my mind, I think: “Okay, so I didn’t put my glass in the dishwasher however I did ten more small chores like that around the kitchen, so we are at net nine kitchen chores. Can I get a break for the one thing I forgot in favor of nine other things!?”
But the person who has the utter misfortune of living with me is, very justifiably, thinking, “The dishwasher was only six more inches past where you left the glass; what is it about the last six inches of the journey to put your dishes in the dishwasher that foils you every time?”
They can’t see the nine things that did get done because those things are done. The observer can only see the thing that is not done. Likewise, if you pick up a book in Barnes and Noble and you flip to the middle of the book and see a typo—is the book poorly edited? I mean, it might be; I don’t know. When you look at a book, you cannot see all the corrections that were made. You can only see the errors that remain.
So when I learn someone else has made a mistake, even if my initial, gut-level reaction is to think, “I would not have made this mistake; I am more careful than this person is,” after a minute I shake that off and remind myself that it’s normal to make mistakes and, yes, I definitely could have made that mistake myself. I don’t believe there’s any kind of mistake I’m above making, personally.
What you can do is look at the mistake as objectively as possible and figure out what, if anything, could have preempted the mistake. Is there an automation you could have built to send a reminder or prompt? Could the party who made the mistake have done something different in their process to prevent the mistake? In other words, is there an opportunity here to make a process improvement that could head off other mistakes of this nature in the future?
If the mistake is not something that could have been averted with a process change, talk to your mistake-making person and ask them to talk with you about what was going on with them when the mistake happened. Did they have too much going on? Did they have something distracting them? Was the dog’s water bowl empty, for example?
Finally: When someone tells you why they made a mistake, remember that the only difference between a reason and an excuse is whether you respect the person you’re talking to.
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