In Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, Kathryn Schulz contrasts the embarrassment and deflation of being wrong with that “gleeful little rush when we are right.” Going further, she points out the extra-delicious feeling we have when someone else is wrong—as Schulz puts it, the “triumphant ha!” of the I-told-you-so moment.
Tackling questions of truth, being, and the way we experience error, Being Wrong does not dwell on the trivial. Schulz’s hope is that by examining and understanding the experience of being wrong, individuals, corporations, and even governments will learn how to be right. She thinks in terms of world peace.
I think more in terms of copyediting.
What is copyediting but a thousand little triumphant ha! moments? If we are honest, we admit to the fun part of discovering the errors of others.* We are smart, eagle-eyed, masters of the craft. Nothing wrong with that.
But have you ever realized in the middle of editing that an editing decision was mistaken? (I’ll take that as a yes.) Out of nowhere, there’s a realization that we’ve been working under a false impression of rightness. Suddenly there’s a new right answer, and after putting things “right” we move forward on those terms.
Here’s the catch—what Kathryn Schulz would like us to learn. It’s not often that we keep in mind the possibility or even likelihood that our current beliefs are wrong. We sail along convinced of our own competence and of the incompetence of others. (Schulz believes that it’s impossible to experience, in the moment, being wrong—rather, we can only experience having been wrong. She writes, “It does feel like something to be wrong. It feels like being right.”)
Schulz believes that experiencing our own errors should be salutary and transforming, rather than deflating or embarrassing. I would add that from erring, we accumulate not only practical learning, but humility, skepticism, and open-mindedness—useful qualities in working with writers and colleagues.
In this way, embracing error can be our contribution, if not to world peace, then to peace in publishing. It’s a start.
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*Let’s forget for now the sickening part of discovering the errors of others: when the errors are so pervasive or deep as to require hours of tedium correcting them, and the triumphant ha! moment becomes a despairing aagh! moment.
Image courtesy of Pixabay by OpenClipart-Vectors.
Thank you! Now if I could get the lovely writers I edit for to see corrections not as crushing insults to their expertise but as nudges in the right direction to help them grow.
Rejoicing in the day,
-Mary
Posted by: Mary Schneider | 08/04/2010 at 08:37 AM