The Anatomy of a Correction
D · Plate 13 in the Corrections series · Other Communications
A correction is a short form with a strict internal order, and almost every failed correction fails by rearranging it. The order is: what was said, that it was wrong, what is true, and what has been done about it. Four parts, in that sequence, with nothing between them.
The sequence is not arbitrary. A reader arriving at a correction may have seen the original or may not. Beginning with the erroneous claim orients both kinds of reader in one sentence. Beginning anywhere else requires the reader to reconstruct what is being corrected, and the reconstruction is where they give up.
What was said
Restate the incorrect claim in its own words, not a summary of it. Summarising is where corrections start to soften: an incorrect figure becomes a reference to details of the figures, and the reader can no longer tell whether the thing they remember reading is the thing being corrected. Quoting the original sentence costs a line and removes the ambiguity.
Where the original was widely repeated, say so. A correction that addresses only the original publication while the claim circulates elsewhere is technically complete and practically useless. Naming the spread is not an admission of additional fault; it is a description of what needs correcting.
That it was wrong, and what is true
The second part is a single clause and should stay that way. The claim was incorrect. Not that it may have given an impression, not that it required clarification, not that it has been updated. Clarified and updated are legitimate words for legitimate operations, and using them for an error is the most common way a correction stops being one.
The third part states the true version with the same specificity as the original error. If the error was a number, the correction carries a number. If it was an attribution, the correction names the right source. A correction that replaces a precise wrong claim with a vague right one has traded one failure for another, and readers notice.
The part everyone leaves out
The fourth part is what has been done, and it is missing from most corrections. It covers when the error was noticed and by whom it was raised, what has changed in the original text, whether anyone acting on the incorrect information has been told, and what will stop the same error recurring. Not all four apply every time; at least one almost always does.
This part is left out partly because it is the only part that requires work rather than drafting. It is also the part that determines whether the correction reads as an obligation being discharged or as an account being kept. A correction ending at what is true tells the reader that the record has been fixed. A correction that says how tells them that someone is watching the record, which is a different and more durable claim.
Two practical matters finish the form. A correction should be dated, because an undated correction floats free of the sequence it belongs to. And it should be findable from the original: a corrected text that carries no mark of having been corrected asks the reader to trust that nothing else has quietly changed, which is exactly the trust the correction was meant to restore.