To Err is Human...
I screwed up.
Maybe you noticed, maybe not. But a few errors slipped through in a couple of my recently published interviews.
Running a publication like this—one in which I’m responsible for the words of another person—can be stressful. I never want to let my interview subjects (and in turn, their publicists) down, so I go through a long, laborious process every time I write up a Q&A: The audio is uploaded to a site and transcribed. I listen to the recording while reading the transcription, fixing errors as I go. I download the transcript and clean up the interview—removing ums, ahs, half sentences, and such, while also cutting it down to an appropriate length.
I write the lede and then proofread the piece, running it through Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar check and then reading and rereading the entire thing multiple times. I have Word’s “read aloud” function read it back to me. I Google every name and every title to make sure nothing is misspelled.
Then I paste the interview into a new Creative Reverberations post, lay out all the images, add any links, and send a draft copy to my email…which I read, both on my phone and on my laptop.
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Once I’m satisfied that everything is perfect and shiny and neat and free of errors, I schedule the interview to run.
So…imagine my complete and utter f’ing dismay when not one, but TWO recent interviews were published with glaring errors.
First up, my piece on John Lawson. The interview itself was fine, but I somehow missed that I’d credited him twice in the same photo.
A week later, in my interview with hair stylist and hair department head Janice Kinigopoulos, her beloved Poppop had become…Popup.
I cannot tell you how upset these idiotic errors make me. They’re the type of things I will carry around with me for years, like some sort of grammatical scarlet letter. Even though I fix them right away, by the time I catch them, the interview has already been shared via email. The mistakes are out there! There’s no going back!
After both of these issues came to light, I took to social media to vent my sorrows and frustrations and got a fantastic reply from another writer. She said, in part, “Typos are how you know it was written by a human and not AI.”
OMG. I can’t tell you how much relief this brought me. Yes, humans screw up. We’re beautifully flawed. Despite our best efforts, we make mistakes.
I’m sharing all of this for two reasons: One, if you, like me, go through a routine of mental self-flagellation every time you find you’ve made an error, remember that you’re human and you’re bound to have an occasional fuck up. It’s okay. In fact, most people probably didn’t even notice and won’t hold it against you as much as you’re holding it against yourself.
And two, let this be a blanket apology for any future mistakes I might make. I’m truly sorry. I will continue to do my best to put out high-quality, error-free work, but if anything slips through, just know that your girl here is running a one-woman, AI-free show and doing the best she can.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for continuing to read, even when Poppops become Popups.
Never even noticed. Be kind to yourself, there are no perfect people no matter what they tell you💕