Fact checking

Fact checking: "Thursday, January 18, 2007

"Fact checking http://ampersandvirgule.blogspot.com/2007/01/fact-checking.html

I have deadlines pressing and, as a result, I have been putting in long hours. So I decided to take a break and peruse the New Yorker that came the other day, the January 22 issue. The magazine has a well-deserved reputation for meticulous editing, even if they make odd style choices (there?s that ?vender? again, I notice).

Numbers, though, are problematic. A great many people come to the writing and editing game having managed to indulge their aversion for all matters mathematical or scientific. They?re great with words?their passion?but having once decided they were math-impaired (whether that?s true or they just suffered abysmal elementary instruction in the subject), they continue through life not worrying too much if they get the fact right where numbers are concerned.

Don?t get me wrong. Fact checking is a big deal at the New Yorker. They?re quite careful with names and dates and places and quotations. But?well, let me quote the paragraph that prompted this post:

This year, Americans will consume close to four trillion kilowatt hours of electricity. In addition, we will burn through a hundred and forty-three billion gallons of gasoline, which at current retail prices will cost us some three hundred and sixty billion dollars, and twenty-six billion gallons of jet fuel, worth fifty billlion dollars. To heat our homes and businesses this winter, we will purchase sixty-two billion dollars? worth of natural gas and heating oil, and just to grill our weenies we will buy some seven hundred and seventy-one million dollars? worth of charcoal briquettes. In 2007, total energy expenditures in the U.S. will come to more than a quadrillion dollars, or roughly a tenth of the country?s gross domestic product.

Where to start?

"Well, let me start with a copyediting nit."