Details matter

One day many years ago, I was working at a temp job at a small leasing company.  The company had hired an outside contractor to design a website for it, and the job had just been completed and the website was live.  The owner was quite excited about it (this was at a time when small businesses having their own websites was not yet common), and he sent a link to everyone at the company so they could see it.  I took a look at the new website, whose most prominent feature was an online application form that potential customers could fill out to apply for a lease.  I immediately noticed that the word "lessee" was spelled wrong on the form.  I e-mailed the owner and pointed this out, but he didn't seem concerned.  It was, after all, a minor error.

A week or so ago, I was watching a PBS video about various forms of energy production in the US.  I noticed that the host of the video kept pronouncing the word "nuclear" as "nucular".  This surprised me a bit, coming from a highly professional outfit like PBS.  Didn't anyone notice it during the video production process?  Most likely they did, but didn't think it was worth correcting.  It was, after all, a minor error.

But minor errors like these do matter.

People who have the habit of precision and attention to detail tend to apply that habit to everything.  Those who are careless and sloppy, on the other hand, tend to be careless and sloppy about everything.  Trivial errors that would have been easy to prevent with a little attention to detail are clues that there may be a deeper problem.

If you want to apply for a lease for something and you're checking out leasing companies online, and you notice that one such company has "lessee" spelled wrong on its website, then you should be hesitant to use that company.  Yes, it's trivial in itself, but it's a very basic word and an essential term in the leasing business.  Seeing it misspelled tells you that they didn't bother to get that basic word right, and if you're smart, you'll immediately wonder what other things they don't bother to get right.  A lease is a legal agreement, and this company has already shown that it's sloppy about the details of things, even if only spelling.  There's a risk that they're sloppy more generally, including about things more critical to the business.

Similarly, if the producers of a video about energy didn't bother to ensure that their presenter was pronouncing "nuclear" correctly, we're entitled to wonder if they were similarly careless about other things, such as facts and figures cited in the video.  It creates a certain level of doubt.

In some cases minor errors directly reveal something substantive.  If I'm listening to somebody who claims to know a lot about the Middle East, and he keeps pronouncing "Iran" and "Iraq" as "Eye-ran" and "Eye-rack", that tells me he has never heard those names pronounced by native speakers of Persian or Arabic (or even by English-speaking specialists who know the correct pronunciation of those names in English), or at least not often enough for it to sink in.  That being the case, it's unlikely that he's really very knowledgeable about things Middle Eastern.

So little things are worth noticing.  An error that seems trivial can tell you something about how much credibility you should give to a source, or how willing you should be to entrust someone with handling a complex task for you.

While I'm on the subject, I should probably address my own use of grammar in certain situations, since some sharp-eyed reader is likely to raise it in response to this post.  I sometimes disregard certain standard grammatical rules, such as the rule against splitting infinitives or using a comma to separate the subject of a sentence from what follows.  This is not because I'm unaware of those rules, or unaware that I'm breaking them.  Rather, it's that clarity is a higher priority to me.  When strict adherence to the rules would make a sentence hard to read or would lead to distractingly clunky phrasing, I prefer to avoid those problems even if it means ignoring the rules.

For example, consider the most famous split infinitive in English, "To boldly go where no man has gone before."  There are basically three options for avoiding the "error":

"Boldly to go where no man has gone before"
"To go boldly where no man has gone before"
"To go where no man has gone before, boldly"

Any of these would sound so clunky and awkward as to ruin the flow and effect of William Shatner's immortal episode intro.  The writers made the right choice by phrasing it the way they did.

As for the comma rule, I'm taking about sentences like "The discoveries he made in evolutionary biology at Stanford after the war as a result of his close collaboration with the French and the Norwegians amazed the world."  With such a long sentence, some readers will lose track of the fact that the grammatical subject is "discoveries", and may interpret the last part as just "the Norwegians amazed the world."  Adding a comma after "Norwegians", though ugly, helps with clarity.  Such monstrously formulated sentences are best avoided, but occasionally cannot be.

I've also noticed that numbers are often mistyped on the internet, and unlike with most mistyped words, you can't usually tell what the correct number was supposed to be.  When you see "300,00", was it supposed to be 30,000 or 300,000?  You can't tell.  And if somebody types 25 when he meant 250, the error is undetectable.  That's why I usually write out numbers in words -- "seventeen" instead of 17, "four hundred" instead of 400, etc -- even when normal practice would be to use numerals.  That way the reader knows the number seen is the one intended.  And, again, if a writer is careless with numbers, can you really trust that he was careful with other details?

As I've said before, the writer has a duty to be clear -- the reader does not have a duty to struggle to understand what the writer failed to make clear.  Details matter.