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Getting it right

Q.
So I was hoping I could run something by you and the Generation J crowd. Work's been pretty intense lately and I'm feeling the pressure.
About six months ago I had a bad two week stint where I had a couple errors and corrections. I freaked out, I met with the editors and talked about how to fix it.
I thought I had the problem beat, but now I'm struggling again with some of my copy.
I'm the early morning web guy before I work on stories during the day and in this instantaneous age of updates, there's not much room to massage the web stories. Most of my problems now are with little stuff, mostly typos, plus it's getting into my print stories. The editors are coming down hard and I'm getting stressed out.
One editor even quoted Hemingway, "The first draft of everything is ***."
I know I probably just need to slow down, but it's like the eds are expecting everything at once and I'm not sure how to handle it. Even if I produce A1 stories, the focus is coming down to the minor writing mistakes of redundancies or missing words on deadline.
Any thoughts?

A.
Thanks for the question! This is something I think many people feel right now with the new web deadlines of now, now, now.
My advice: don't freak out over corrections - use them to stop and rethink how you are doing your job. If you just get stressed out by them and let them get you down - they're liable to happen again. I know what you mean, though, by the stress of big stories for the newspaper and little stories, all the time for the web. The important thing is just to tell your editors that they need to back off the pressure enough so that you can be correct in your writing. If they are decent editors they'll prefer you having better, more correct stories that take a few extra minutes to turn in for editing. Hope that helps.

Any other advice for this reporter?
Published Wednesday, July 18, 2007 5:58 AM by SonyaSmith
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Comments

# re: Q and A: Getting it right

Wednesday, July 18, 2007 12:05 PM by Dale Denwalt II
I don't have any advice for dealing with your editors but as for writing better copy, I like to step away from the computer for 5-10 minutes just to give my eyes and brain a break. I can usually catch one or two things when I get back.

# re: Q and A: Getting it right

Wednesday, July 18, 2007 2:18 PM by ElysseJames
If you're the writer all the responsibility for catching errors should not be on you. Where are your copy editors in all this? I would hope you've got at least one other person reading all the copy you publish, both on the Web and on paper.

# re: Q and A: Getting it right

Thursday, July 19, 2007 4:40 PM by Brea Jones
From the Web side, I get to read the stories people pound out quickly, and I assure you that you are not the only professional making typos and simple mistakes when writing too fast. It's easy for those mistakes to get on the Web because while five or six people read a story before it goes into print, often only one person reads it before going online, and we copy editors are under just as much of a time crunch as you reporters.

My main suggestion is to catch mistakes as you type them. I'm not sure what system you are using to write in because many newspapers have proprietary systems where you have to manually spell-check, which is easy to forget on deadline, and some Web sites use Web-based content-management systems that don't even have spell-check, like me. I often catch spelling and grammar errors by pasting into Microsoft Word or using Mozilla's Firefox browser with spell-check enabled. The red and green squiggles help a lot.

In the end, it is your byline, and taking two extra minutes to check over your story before sending it to your editor or a Web producer may save five or 10 minutes of someone else's time.

Hope this helps!
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