When I returned to the office the day after Christmas, I had messages from two readers about perceived errors in the January issue. As director of editorial research and the magazine’s style maven, I’ve dealt with such letters for many years and by-and-large enjoy this chance to communicate with our readers. They care as much as we do about the words in National Geographic, and we should listen to their concerns as well as to share with them how we think. 

Of course it’s easier to answer letters from gentle, polite, thoughtful readers than it is the blasts we occasionally get from what another wordsmith calls the gotcha gang. My Christmas communications represented one of each.

The first was a polite voice mail message left in the Editor’s office a few days before Christmas by a mountain climber, who pointed out that we had the wrong elevation for Annapurna on page 117 of the Polish climbing story in the January issue. The correct figure is 26,502 feet, not 29,502. The gentle reader was, unfortunately, right. A researcher on our staff transposed the 6 to a 9 when inserting the elevation into the text, and none of the rest of us reading proofs noticed that we had consequently made Annapurna higher than Everest. Such a mistake is particularly embarrassing for a geographic publication that prides itself on a rigorous research process.

The second reader was less temperate in tone, calling us to task for a typo on page 142—“you replaced ‘sure’ with ‘sore’ ”—and concluding with, “Seeing such a stupid mistake in an otherwise wonderful publication is extremely disconcerting.” Needless to say, I was also disconcerted until I found the sentence in question and assured myself that it was correct as written, though I could see why the reader had misread it: “He was not sore [sure] the owner didn’t want to sell, because it might have been a family home.” This reader was gracious enough to write back to apologize.

Although we are only human and will sometimes print factual or grammatical errors, we set extremely high standards for ourselves and have many safeguards in place to prevent sloppy or inaccurate writing. Our readers too have high expectations for our magazine, and we try hard not to disappoint them or ourselves. On those rare occasions when we are wrong, we admit it, look for ways to prevent such a mistake from happening again, and move on.

As one of my bosses said after I had let a misspelling slip into print early in my career, we can at least take solace in the fact that no one was harmed by the error.

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