Perfection is not the realm of humans. How to help your clients understand this, today, in my How To column at Copyediting.com.
The rest of you: re-flippin-lax. The world will not crumble because you missed that one little mistake. You are human. Now, convincing your client of this is another matter entirely. But I’d start by explaining the scientifically supported limits of human perfection. And perhaps the equation of good, fast, or cheap.
Other posts mentioned in this post:
- mitigating editorial risk: accept, assign, assume, or reject
- scientifically supported limits of human editor perfection
- how many errors trigger a reprint
- the project management triangle of good, fast, or cheap
- checklist of final checks
Thanks to my sports-specialist colleague Patricia Morris MacDonald for explaining how to properly phrase a save percentage statistic. I can haz sports analogy.
Photo by opensourceway used under CC BY-2.0 license.
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