A small grammatical error can cause a big misunderstanding. But there are many ways your story can be read in a way you didn’t intend.
A man is late because he took a bottle of cabernet, instead of a cab. (Illustration by News Decoder.)
Have you ever posted something only to have people misunderstand? Let’s say you tell people about a performance you were in: “I got on stage and I was on fire!”
To you it was a great performance. They think something went really wrong with the pyrotechnics.
In journalism, some bad things can be traced back to unintentional misunderstandings of a story. In 1998, news stories covered a study by a doctor that seemed to link measles vaccines to autism. Even though it was based only on anecdotal reports from just 12 patients, it sparked today’s anti-vaccine movement. People focused on the possible link and not the flimsiness of the evidence.
It isn’t enough to make sure that everything you report comes from trusted sources. You have to also anticipate how people will read your story or hear your podcast. Know that people often read quickly, while thinking about the meal they have to cook, the assignment that is due or the kids they have to pick up from school. They will only half listen to your podcast while carefully measuring out flour for the pancakes.
When you write, it helps to picture yourself talking to someone who is multitasking or distracted.
It also helps to follow what we call the ABCs: Accuracy, Brevity and Clarity.
A is for Accuracy
Is it factually true? Know that if you report a rumor you will likely spread and inflame it. People want to have their own knowledge affirmed. They don’t like being told they were wrong about something. If you give them two opposing sides, they will give more weight to the side they already believe. So be careful when reporting anything not backed up by reliable evidence.
Is it grammatically correct? A missing comma or one in the wrong place can change the meaning of a sentence. The same goes with an apostrophe. When Hillary Clinton was running against Donald Trump for the U.S. presidency in 2016, one news outlet reported this on social media: Clinton invited several people to the debate, including Mark Cuban, a 9/11 survivor and a domestic abuse survivor.
Now, Cuban is a billionaire who owns a professional basketball team and is known for being on the hit show Shark Tank. But he wasn’t at the World Trade Center on 9/11 and he isn’t a survivor of domestic abuse. A later post corrected the error:
Hillary Clinton has invited a 9/11 survivor, a single mother and domestic abuse survivor, and Mark Cuban among others to tonight’s debate.
Is everything spelled correctly?
The Guardian newspaper fessed up to this embarrassing mistake. An article quoted the chair of a football club saying this: “Our team was the worst in the First Division and I’m sure it’ll be the worst in the Premier League.” Unfortunately, he wasn’t talking about the sport at all. His quote should have been: “Our tea was the worst in the First Division and I’m sure it’ll be the worst in the Premier League.”
B is for Brevity
The longer the sentence and the longer the paragraph the more room there is for an unintentional error.
If you are the type who likes to string out words, bear this in mind: The Lord’s Prayer is just 66 words. The Ten Commandments are 179 words. Hamlet’s “To Be or Not To Be speech” is 259 words and Abraham Lincoln’s entire Gettysburg Address – one of the most famous speeches in history – is just 286 words. That can fit on one Google Doc page double spaced.
C is for Clarity
It is more important that readers or listeners understand exactly what you are saying to them than that it reads well or sounds great. That means that you shouldn’t concentrate on the flow of your story. It can be choppy. Journalism isn’t poetry. One of my pet peeves as a reader is that so many great investigative stories are long and tedious to read. Only people willing to work at reading the story or book will end up informed.
Be careful about the words you choose. One linguistics study in the 1960s found that the 500 most common words in the English language have more than 14,000 different meanings!
So how can you ABC-proof any story you write or podcast you drop?
Kill anything vague or unclear. Be specific. If you can say “5% rate of interest”, don’t say “moderate rate of growth.” If you can say “the Dec. 16 report, don’t say “the recent communication”.
Don’t rely on your spell checker and be very careful when you use AI, because the robot won’t be as diligent as you and might not spot unintentional puns or misspellings or the misuse of a homonym.
Prune your writing. Swap out a big, fancy word for one that is shorter and clearer. Kill unneeded phrases: Like “in fact,” “along the lines of,” due to”, “as I mentioned previously…”
Limit your sentences to one noun-verb pair. For example, this should be four separate sentences: At the ceremony, while the president spoke, some senators listened while others dozed, the press crowded around outside, and the Secret Service agents scanned the audience.
Keep your paragraphs short – just one to three sentences per paragraph. Not only is this visually easier for your readers, but it will make it easier for you to spot any unintentional errors.
And when you feel tempted towards wordiness, go back to that Gettysburg Address. Of those 286 words, only 1 in five of them are longer than two syllables.
Questions to consider:
1. How can a homonym change the meaning of a sentence?
2. Why does the author recommend short sentences and paragraphs to avoid misunderstandings?
3. Can you think of a time that someone completely misunderstood something you said or wrote?
Marcy Burstiner is the educational news director for News Decoder. She is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School and professor emeritus of journalism and mass communication at the California Polytechnic University, Humboldt in California. She is the author of the book Investigative Reporting: From premise to publication.