What a Correction Log Is For

D · Plate 15 in the Corrections series · Other Communications

A correction log is a list of the errors a publication has made and repaired, in order, with dates. Most organisations that publish anything do not keep one, and the usual objection is that collecting failures in one place makes them look worse than they are. The objection assumes the log is a display. It is better understood as an instrument.

The instrument reading comes from what a log does that individual corrections cannot. A single correction addresses one error. A log addresses the pattern of errors, and patterns are where the recoverable value is. Nobody can see a pattern in corrections scattered across a year of separate pages.

What the pattern shows

Read a year of corrections together and they sort themselves into a small number of kinds. Figures transposed at the final edit. Attributions to the wrong source within a group of similar sources. Dates that were right when drafted and wrong when published. Names spelled by ear. The kinds are remarkably stable, and each one has a specific operational remedy that no amount of general carefulness will produce.

This is the argument that convinces most sceptics. A log turns a moral subject into a procedural one. The question stops being whether people are being careful enough, which has no useful answer, and becomes which checks are missing at which point, which does.

Keeping it usable

A log needs the date of publication, the date of correction, the text corrected, the nature of the error and a link to the corrected page. The interval between the two dates is worth recording explicitly, because it is the number most likely to improve with attention and the one nobody notices otherwise.

It should be kept in one place and never pruned. Pruning a correction log destroys the only thing that made it valuable, and it will be noticed by exactly the readers whose trust the log was meant to earn. Old entries growing stale is not a problem; a log is a record, and records are allowed to be long.

The effect on everything else

The least expected consequence of keeping a log is its effect on drafting. Writers who know that errors will be recorded in a durable list check differently. Not more anxiously, in practice, but more specifically: they check the categories that appear in the log, because those are the ones that have proven capable of getting through.

The second consequence is on the corrections themselves. A correction destined for a permanent list is written more plainly than one expected to be seen once. The vague constructions that soften an isolated correction look conspicuous in a column of entries, where the difference between a clear entry and an evasive one is visible at a glance.

The final argument is the simplest. Errors are already public; the only question is whether the account of them is kept by the organisation that made them or assembled by someone else from the fragments. A log is the cheaper option, and it is the only version of the record that can also include what was done about each one.