Embrace Our Mistakes

This is an interesting article about teaching school students to embrace their mistakes; to learn and grow from them, rather than be embarrassed or ashamed of them. Sadly, even as adults we view the red pen as a mark of shame, instead of a guide to learning.

As an editor my goal is twofold - I want to improve someone's writing for them AND I want them to understand why I've made the changes and to learn from those changes.

For example, yesterday I edited an article that had a sentence, "The structure of questions and problems posed in our tasks were too generic." This is a common problem in complex, multi-phrase sentences. The plurals (questions and problems) have been incorrectly connected to the verb (were). The subject of the sentence is actually "the structure", which is singular; therefore, the verb is also singular (was). To simplify the sentence makes the issue clear, ""The structure in our tasks were too generic" is obviously incorrect. When I 'red penned' the error (with track changes in the document file) I also added a comment explaining my edit.

I'm sure there are many people who don't want to have an editor read their material simply because they don't want to deal with the emotional fall out of the mistakes. But I don't know a single editor or who says, "AHA! Gotcha! What an idiot!" It is true, we may laugh at some mistakes, we may make fun of some mistakes, but rest assured - we are not making fun of the writer. We are only too aware that we could have made just the same mistake ourselves. I'm sure I've written some completely stupid things in the past, and I will continue to write horrid English in the future. Some may simply be typos (we all make those), but some will be because I didn't know any better. I can only hope that if someone is kind enough to point them out to me that I will not respond with shame and embarrassment, but that I will hold my head high and say, "I'm learning, I'm growing"; that I will endeavour to follow Churchill's example of "... going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm."