Tag: fact-checking

Having an idea is a great start, but can it withstand some scrutiny? Fact-checking is an important step in supporting the legitimacy of a project.

This week I rewatched the film Bells Are Ringing, a 1960 musical comedy with Judy Holliday and Dean Martin. Alongside some playful songs, the writers slipped in a message about the importance of fact-checking. You see, switchboard operator Judy Holliday is unwittingly relaying phone orders for a betting syndicate. The ringleader created a “simple little system” that disguises horse tracks as classical music composers and horses as symphonies. So instead of betting $500 on the third horse to win a race at Belmont Park, the bettor calls up Judy to place an order for 500 albums of Beethoven’s third symphony, and she passes along that information to the supposed music warehouse. (The full explanation can be found in this musical number.)

But the system can’t weather the scrutiny of anyone with some basic knowledge of classical music. The ringleader gets very flustered when a young grocer’s assistant with an interest in the record company poses a few questions. And the whole operation falls apart because of this young man’s musical knowledge. He happens to be delivering groceries when Judy takes an order for Beethoven’s tenth symphony. He comments that it must be a mistake, that Beethoven only has nine symphonies. (Read more about the “Curse of the Ninth” here.) And so, Judy changes all the orders that day from Beethoven’s tenth to Beethoven’s ninth to match the facts—and the ringleader’s simple little system falls completely apart.

This sequence of events is a great lesson in how ideas need to be able to pass scrutiny with the audience. The system was based on lies and a little fact-check poked a big hole in the whole scheme.

I did plenty of fact-checking this week for a fiction manuscript that happened to have multiple music references. All the songs did indeed exist and, once they checked out, they made it onto the style sheet. This is the “simple little system” editors use to track any proper nouns, style decisions, plot points, and characters in one document to ensure consistency. It’s how I caught that a character was given two different last names; it also helped catch a spot where the timeline wasn’t adding up. By the end, my style sheet included a whole soundtrack of songs to accompany the book, and I could report back that the factual details would hold up to reader scrutiny.

Looking for fact-checking and careful attention to the ideas in your story? An editor can help with that! Review the basic categories of editing on my Services page.

A few days ago was Bastille Day, what my brain’s shorthand considers the French equivalent of our July 4th. Each year now, the date takes me back to the year I celebrated Bastille Day in Paris with a picnic and fireworks. These fireworks were memorable because I got to watch them from the lawn in front of the Eiffel Tower.  

As the fireworks brightened the sky and then faded out over this iconic monument, another light display gradually took its spot next to the Eiffel Tower as well: the Big Dipper. It’s one of the easiest constellations to spot and here it was, ready to be spotted. Yet some people don’t know it as the Big Dipper. If they grew up in the UK, they may call it the Plough. Others link this set of stars to Ursa Major, the Great Bear, or maybe they prefer the name Drinking Gourd.

My role as an editor is to track which term an author uses and check for consistency. The term they choose can be significant. I worked on a history book project that highlighted how the “Drinking Gourd” pointed to the North Star and thus helped enslaved people navigate their journeys northward and out of enslavement. The National Park Service’s website was one of my go-tos for checking U.S. history facts from writers I worked with. Meanwhile, using the term Ursa Major, the Great Bear, would link the collection of stars to many different oral storytelling traditions and mythologies across the globe.

This constellation contains and inspires a breadth of stories for people to hear or read about and learn something new. Whenever I spot the Big Dipper in the sky, I remember the stories it has been linked to over the years, including my story of seeing it grace the sky next to the Eiffel Tower. 

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