Michael Thomsen — The Monarch Review

We Regret The Illusion: Typos, Fact Checkers And The Cult Of Sic – Michael Thomsen

Thursday, October 11, 2012 12:39 — 0 Comments

“We don’t have fact checkers,” an editor once told me, “so if there’s a mistake, it’s your ass.” I was writing a difficult story, based on months of research about a subject that had no widely accepted experimental record. In the process of working through six different drafts, we wrestled back and forth over my word choices, him trimming explanations he thought too long, and then asking for more specificity about other ideas I’d condensed into single-sentence glosses. In almost every draft I discovered a note where he would ask me to fact check a sentence he had put into […]