Missing the mark

Every once in a while I like to show my students a draft of my dissertation all marked up with comments from readers. I repeatedly subjected individual chapters to rigorous proofreading, seeking and receiving substantive feedback from my committee chair and several friends who make their living writing and editing, and I revised extensively until I was certain that everything was perfect--but the penultimate draft still ended up with a word containing the letter L three times in a row.

If multiple careful readers equipped with advanced degrees can't catch an errant L, who can hope to produce error-free prose? Why do I keep encouraging students to aim for perfection if it's virtually impossible to hit the target?

Because if they can't hit the bullseye every time, I would like them to at least be allowed to stay in the contest.

Much as we'd like to deny it, much of academic life is contest: we compete for the approval of hiring committees, tenure committees, editors, grant institutions, and others with the power to make our lives wonderful or miserable. It's a bad idea to hand those readers easy reasons to reject our ideas, and if they're distracted by our inability to distinguish between its and it's, they're unlikely to be wowed by our brilliance.

Which is why I'm returning a set of sloppy papers without comments and offering students 24 hours to revise and resubmit. They probably won't see this opportunity as the gift it really is, but I'll achieve my goal if they move their writing a little closer to the target.