When an argument stumbles right out of the gate

The Boulder Daily Camera editorial this past weekend begins:

Monday is Memorial Day, and the best thing anyone can do, says Gulf War veteran Jason Scott Fearing, is to seek out a veteran and start a real, honest, conservation. It could lead to a lifelong friendship, a greater understanding of humanity, or simply and no less importantly allow one veteran to be heard.

An editorial is the official position of a publication on some issue of community interest, and this one doesn't seem all that controversial. But underlaying it may be the editorial writer observing many people saying, "Thank you for your service," to veterans and then leaving it at that.

That statement -- thank you for your service -- takes almost no investment by the speaker, could apply to almost any situation, and amounts to something like, "Have a nice day" or "Thoughts and prayers." These sorts of phrases are polite, of course, and aren't horrible in and of themselves.

But the opening paragraph of the editorial quickly establishes why the piece is being published that day, introduces a main character readers can care about. The second sentence uses the Power of Three examples to build a foundation for the rest of the argument.

One problem with this first graf, as you may have noticed immediately, is that the last word of the opening sentence should have been "conversation," not conservation. Sort of a "real, honest" typo.

When we discuss the importance of openings in our writing, we focus on grabbing reader attention and setting the scene or the situation right away. We also need to focus on getting each word right.

When we read a newspaper or a post or even a memo, we expect, at a minimum, that the words and constructions be correct. If we almost immediately encounter a mistake, that damages the writer's credibility (ethos) and puts everything else in the piece of writing into question. Hey, if the point of the editorial is to have a conversation, but we don't get that word right... Well, next story, please.

Spell check can't save us here. Conservation is a perfectly lovely word. It's just not the one the writer meant to use.

A more subtle error in the second sentence is that the series describing what such a conversation might produce is not "parallel." A parallel series repeats the syntax structure in each part of the series. What could a conversation lead to? A friendship. Understanding. And allowing (oops). So the series ends up noun, noun, verb, and that is sloppy writing.

What might clean this up? One try: "...a lifelong friendship, a greater understanding of humanity, or an opportunity for a veteran to be heard."

Everybody needs an editor, of course, but what happens to our credibility when the editors themselves make simple errors?