Getting it right

 Jan. 25, 2021

I saw a story in today’s Colorado Sun (an online-only newspaper) and was interested in a piece on the Colorado state budget and how it is put together (and how it affects most people in the state). 

It was full of insights and broken into multiple sections to help me follow along. 

But as I read, I encountered this sentence: “Every four months, state and legislative economists release quarterly revenue forecasts that tell lawmakers how much money the state expects to collect in taxes based on current and future economic conditions.”

Something is not right here. You could issue a report every four months, or you can issue a report quarterly, but those are not the same.

Here’s a question for us, as writers: Is this bad writing or bad editing or bad math (journalists are famously troubled by math), or something else?

All the words are spelled correctly and the grammar and sentence structure are fine.

But I keep repeating, “Writing is thinking made visible,” and the error here equals bad writing. Should an editor have caught the error? Should the author have known better? Yes to both those questions, but neither happened. 

Just a silly little error? Well, we might begin wondering what other “silly little errors” we might encounter in the publication. 

Enough doubt about the journalism and you might start wondering what is true. And I think we all know where THAT can lead us.