Earlier this week I was in a meeting where someone questioned a document. The item had been approved for distribution, yet there was a clear and rather glaring error in it. Oops…! Worse still, the “approved” item had been read by a group of people who had all “checked it” and given the required permission for it to be circulated. Yet, it was obvious that not one of those people had noticed the error.
I wonder if the same gremlins had been working for the UK Government. This week it published a 40-page glossy document about its plans for a “Network North” project, aimed at improving the railway system in the North of England. However, the map on the front cover had labelled the town of Preston as “Manchester”. Inside, the document promised that the link between Manchester Airport and the City centre would finally be built. The only problem with that statement is that this extension was completed in 2014 and has been running for almost a decade. The glossy brochure also promised that trains between Leeds and Sheffield would be “quadrupled”. However, as one travel journalist pointed out, that line currently has five trains per hour, so arranging the quadrupling would be somewhat challenging. Even more confusing was that the document promises that this northern rail project would improve journey times around Plymouth.
What’s clear is that the Network North document had not been read properly before it was published. The errors were spotted within hours of its publication. How multiple people preparing the brochure did not notice the errors is perplexing.
Such a problem, though, is not new. Mistakes that should have been spotted with proper and careful reading often get through. Just ask the former boss of the coin mint in Chile. One 50 peso coin was allowed into circulation even though the word “Chile” was misspelled. Back in 2017, the Cambridge News local paper published an edition with the front-page headline “100pt Splash Heading Here”. Obviously, nobody read that before it was put on sale. Similarly, in the first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” there is a mistake on Page 53 where the young wizard is required to have just “one wand” twice…!
Errors in printing clearly make it through despite careful checking. So, it’s no wonder that the “approved” report I was reading this week had errors. Equally, it’s understandable to some extent that a hurriedly produced government document can similarly include mistakes.
Part of the issue could be that we do not spot mistakes so easily when reading on screen. Research shows we are less tired when we read from print rather than on screen. The higher level of reading fatigue when looking at the screen could explain why we don’t notice the mistakes so much. Equally, the study found that we make more “fixations” when looking at printed documents than we do for screen-based reading. A fixation is when your eye stops scanning and pauses to actually look at the document. We do that more times for print than for screens. So, that could explain why it is easier to spot mistakes in print as we are “taking in” more of the document than we would do if we just read it on screen.
We have quickly been able to adapt to screen reading so that our comprehension does not differ from reading in print. However, the research shows our confidence in what we read is improved if it is in print and not on the screen. Combine that with more fixations and lowered fatigue, and it’s easy to understand why we are more likely to notice mistakes when we read from print and not on the screen.
Important documents in your office could have mistakes creeping through if you rely solely on screen reading. Printing them out and reading them could help you spot mistakes and errors more readily.
Alternatively, if you want to save paper and ink, this is where Artificial Intelligence can help you. You can ask ChatGPT, for instance, to spot any errors in a document. Not only does it find proofreading issues, but it also detects errors of logic or failures of explanation. Or you can ask it to summarise what you have written. This will highlight any issues with your document as the summary would amplify any glaring errors – such as suggesting Plymouth is in the North of England…!
What’s clear to me this week is that errors in documents slip through easily, even if teams of people have supposedly checked them. Printing out documents to read could help solve that issue. So too can artificial intelligence. There is also another thing we can do ourselves and that is simply to concentrate on what we are reading and not try to multitask by reading an on-screen document at the same time as watching YouTube or doom scrolling through TikTok…!
