I have a book manuscript that I’ve been over probably a hundred times, making corrections each time. I just sent it to a friend to look. He’s found dozens of missing words, typos, and misspelled names.
What’s even more amazing is that while I’m correcting to incorporate his notes, I’m finding more mistakes, some in the same paragraphs he marked.
Realistically, a big manuscript contains maybe a million characters, including punctuation, and even if 99.9% are correct, that leaves room for a thousand mistakes. Nevertheless, it’s confounding, irritating, and embarrassing.
Exactly correct. I suppose that there are some borderline cases that we could construct but the difference between MH and a two year age discrepancy are two completely different things and not really similar in any way.
LOL. But I experienced the same. I had my resume professionally done. Looked great. I checked for details. I gave it to a friend who is a professional editor- and she found some errors. gahh!!
Yes, calling someone to task over the difference between being 45 and 47 serves no purpose except to say “I think you are lying”. (Or possibly, “I am confused by this story, did I miss two years?” But that was not what the moderated post said.) Noting that someone claims to be a doctor in a medical thread, and a lawyer in a legal thread, and on a school board in a thread about school finances, is really quite different. I can assure you the moderators here don’t care about immaterial differences in your story, like your precise age in a dating thread. It’s only discrepancies that are material to your credibility that would be considered egregious falsehoods:
Tangential: Are you proof reading on a screen?
I ask because it seems as if it’s nearly impossible to do well on a screen. I don’t know why, but if I want to be certain, I find that printing greatly improves chances of finding errors.
And an aside to the tangent: For some reason, making a pdf improves proof reading some, although not as much as a hard copy.
As a child, I used to proofread on paper, and still missed any number of errors. Worse, when I was correcting them, I’d introduce new ones. Typing on screen is a vast improvement in that category.
And I had the same experience on my last book, which was copyedited by the publisher’s full-time professional. (They wanted both paper and electronic copies.) I still found errors in the printed book, not even including the ones the publisher introduced.
I take consolation in the fact that copyeditor wrote me that he had a hard time doing his job properly because he kept getting caught up in the text. Meant more than a dozen reviews.
To continue the tangent a bit, it is it not the screen per-se, it is seeing it in a different medium that makes the difference. One way to help with proofreading using the screen is to change the font if it is immaterial to the writing, or transfer it to a different screen (e.g. a tablet from a laptop). This is why I find the preview in Discourse helpful because it looks different than what I write in the text box (or at least different enough) that I can see errors more readily.
I tend to obfuscate my age by giving a range, rather than a fake number. But as this is at least partly about moderation, i think i can go in the record saying that the mods don’t care about small, immaterial lies.
If someone lies enough that it becomes evident - and yes, it takes exactly as much effort to come up with a lie as it does to just not give personal details - then they’re fair game for losing credibility. Pointing out why a poster lacks credibility is one of the more useful functions of the Pit. Likewise, pointing out something inconsequential as a “gotcha,” particularly if your gotcha is objectively incorrect, will have precisely the opposite effect. That’s what we’ve seen here.
Same here. That’s what I consider not giving details
Sure, but the users as a group might have different concerns (especially given various previous liars)
I agree that something like Moonlight’s 2-year age discrepancy (even if it weren’t accounted for, as it was) is no big thing. But little things can add up, so I’m not going to judge someone harshly just for taking note of a small discrepancy. Only for what they do with that observation.
That kind of detective work should be confined to PMs to mods and the Pit troll thread, that should go without saying. If D’Anconia had gone to the troll thread first, they would have been saved a bit of egg on their face, I think.
Honest question: what if someone asks something like “do 10-year olds still like Harry Potter?” In my response, I don’t want to reveal that I have a 10-year old daughter, so I reference “my niece” instead of a daughter.
It’s important information to demonstrate some level of authority. I think making up a niece or daughter completely to pretend I have authority would be absolutely wrong and worthy of a warning, but this kind of change seems fine to me. Am I off base?
Why do you have to reference any specific relationship at all? Just “the 10 y.o. in my family” does the same job, conveys the same “not just making this up” sense, and doesn’t reveal too much personal detail.
Although I have to say, personally, i find “I don’t want to reveal that I have a 10-year old daughter” to be a little on the paranoid side.
I’m of the opinion that credibility tends to speak for itself in an anonymous environment like this. There’s no such thing, really, as ‘establishing credibility’ on a message board just by saying you are what you are. Qadgop has told us that he’s a doctor at a prison, but he’s shown us by being a consistent and knowledgeable source of information on those topics for many years. The latter is much more important, and his posts would be useful (and obviously coming from a place of lived experience) even if he never made his job explicit.
If I saw a topic where I felt ‘establishing credibility’ via too-sensitive personal details was absolutely integral to thread participation, I would choose not to participate rather than lying.
Like I said above, I don’t think obfuscating personal details online is exactly a cardinal sin, but if you lose credibility or goodwill as a result you have nobody to blame but yourself. Distrusting a person because you find out they’ve been consistently lying to you is a very human reaction. And if I know you (the hypothetical you) are a consistent liar, why on earth should I believe you when you tell me that you only lie about certain things? How do I even begin to gauge that?
But if you say, “I have experience in these matters” and then - without any personal details - show me that you are knowledgeable and interesting? All to the good. I don’t need to know you have a daughter or a niece or a neighbor. Just be a cool human and tell me interesting things.
This is not about the rules. It’s about your comfort with your statements, and about how other posters might judge you if they realize your story is inconsistent in these ways.
Different posters will judge you by different standards. So at the end of the day, it comes back to what you are comfortable with.
I have a 10-year-old daughter. Add that to I am an attorney. Add to that I live in the Seattle area. Add enough identifying details, and anybody who wants to find you IRL will be able to.
Agreed.
You’re either credible or you’re not. You’re either trolling or you’re not.
Any focus on “misrepresentation” does nothing but begin constant witch-hunting, and it fosters a toxic culture.
