The thrill of being right

RIGHT

I love being right. Who doesn’t, really? Who would choose to be wrong?

In my work, getting to the bottom of what’s right is sort of like one of those nesting dolls.

Not to overstate things, because I’m not an investigative journalist whatsoever (although I admire the heck out of them).

In a typical newsletters, we accumulate eight top stories for the topic (for example, I do a social work newsletter). A team member finds the story and writes a two-sentence summary of the story. It’s my job to confirm that what was written is correct.

The thing is — and I know this will hardly shock anyone — the stories written by journalists are often not right. It’s not necessarily that THEY set out to write something inaccurate, but if they only skim the surface of an issue, or don’t look into both sides, or don’t dig into boring minutes of a city council or county commission meeting (for example), the story our writer is basing their summary on is dubious at best.

It’s in digging through the layers of the truth behind a story that I find pleasure in a job well done. And it frustrates me when someone in a quality control capacity finds something that I missed (they’re just doing their job, I know, but I feel personally responsible for not missing those types of things).

I suspect sometime in my life I’ll look back at my writing from this season of my life and say, “wow you really wrote about mistakes often.”

I suppose awareness is the first step in getting things right.

Welcome to this week’s Five Minute Friday. Our instructions, via creator Kate Motaung: “Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation.” (But I can’t resist spell checking, as you can imagine.)