You don't want to know how many typos we found in the Beast in the final big edit. Trust me. You don't. |
...schools should encourage students to acknowledge their mistakes because that’s the way the “big wide world” works...Erm, excuse me? Mister Claxton, what planet are you living on, and how can I get there? The last time I looked around in the "big wide world" that I am currently living in, mistakes are not acknowledged, oh no. They are brushed over, or hushed up, or even rewarded with a hefty chunk of severance pay. When was the last time you heard a politician declare openly and publicly that he or she had fucked up, made a serious mistake, is very sorry and then actually did something to remedy the error? Or when did they obviously learn from a mistake?
Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, professor Claxton said: “The eraser is an instrument of the devil because it perpetuates a culture of shame about error. It’s a way of lying to the world, which says ‘I didn’t make a mistake. I got it right first time.’ That’s what happens when you can rub it out and replace it.Being able to fix your mistakes and make things better is not something, in my experience, that perpetuates shame about the error. On the contrary - I'd be much more ashamed about something that has to stand visibly for everybody to see. I do know that many of my colleagues feel the same about visible errors in their craftwork. If it can be fixed without trace, it should be okay to fix without trace; often enough, that is not the case anyway, because there will remain a reminder of the error that is at least visible to the person who made the thing. Life is hard enough without having to live with all your little mistakes visible to the world, too.
It made me wonder about overlap between erasing mistakes and the google right to be forgotten. In amongst the arguments about people being able to hide serious mistakes of their past, for good or bad (and whether someone thinks of the act or the being found out as the mistake), there is also the loss of the ability to change your mind. Whereas in the past the new view and its reasoning would be more prominent than the older view, now a search engine can bring them up with equal prominence, with or without reasoning. That would confuse the issue and perpetuate old 'mistakes'.
There is this weird old fashioned Dutch habit to hang tiles with some rhymed aphorisms or sayings in the house, often in the bathroom. At an old workplace of mine, one hung that I never forgot. Translated it would have said something like who doesn't make mistakes, mostly makes nothing.
Erasers and mistakes are both useful in a learning process, but not required to show in the end result. They are a distraction that influence the readers perception of information, even after a writer became aware that a different approach would improve his writing. So, make glorious mistakes, but erase them after learning from them.