May all your sources be as reliable as Old Faithful. Photo by Emily Campbell on Unsplash.
Our series of posts addressing best practices in content writing continues.
Previously, we’ve looked at audience, jargon, and the potential problem of “TMI.” In this installment, we’re looking at something that gets little or no notice in everyday discourse, but which should receive a great deal of attention in online content: fact checking.
There are a great many ways to cover this concept. We’re going to take a simple approach and only look at two important aspects: why fact checking matters, plus some general guidelines that will help you find the best sources to deliver reliable fact checking.
Why does fact checking matter? The obvious reason is that you want all of your content to be as factually correct as possible, at all times. But when you provide reliable, fact-checked information, all of your site visitors—the simple browsers, the potential customers and clients, and even others in your industry—also see clearly that your site is a source of high-quality content. The posts and pages on your site exist to showcase your capabilities and your expertise, and part of that is demonstrating your integrity by transmitting only the most up-do-date and verified knowledge in those areas of expertise.
Your pages and posts will always include opinion, and sometimes a great deal of it. There’s nothing wrong with that approach. However, those opinions should not be based solely on personal experience and instincts, let alone on whims and arbitrary preferences. Your opinions—your informed opinions—should be supported by authorities other than yourself.
A lawyer, for instance, would not want to state that one particular approach to a category of lawsuit is always correct. She might instead note that, “in general, these three approaches are the most common,” and then might provide a few case law reference to expand on specific points. A wise approach would also be to note that “no approach guarantees success, because the circumstances of every case are unique.”
A landscape design consultant might state that one species of plant is the ideal groundcover in a particular situation. Such a statement might always, at the core, be considered an opinion, but an opinion of this kind can be supported by solid facts: not only could personal accounts of past success, or client testimonials, support this opinion, but also links to commercial nursery pages or state environmental department recommendations. A statement becomes less a matter of mere opinion and more a matter of best practice when it’s supported and endorsed by others.
How can you verify that the facts used in your content are correct? Where can you turn for validation of the facts you’ve used?
Checking items that can be viewed as simple data is straightforward. If, for instance, you wanted to confirm the approximate population of the state of New Hampshire, you could easily locate this information in a number of unimpeachable sources, including the US Census Bureau and the state’s web site (the NH Office of Strategic Initiatives publishes that data). Other data, such as the number of drunk driving crashes in a recent year, can be found in reliable and specialized sources.
At the risk of reading like a resource guide for college writing students, online sources have variable reliability. Here is a simplified and incomplete discussion of some of the common types of fact-checking resources you could use and how well they can be trusted.
Government sources at all levels are often the most reliable for data and statistics. The US Census Bureau, for example, or the National Highway Transportation Safety Authority. Our experience is that government sources often become slightly less reliable as they move from large to small; Federal resources are usually of high quality, but those in the states (especially small states) might be a bit less reliable, while those at the county or town level can be less reliable still. Our opinion (not supported by any statistical evidence) is that the entities with the greatest population (and therefore the most financial and staffing resources) have the best data. Concerns have been raised in recent years over the decisions of Federal and state governments to restrict access to data that had previously been public. We haven’t yet noticed a decline in data quality because of this, but some data has become more difficult to locate.
Specialized information resources, such as encyclopedias, dictionaries, and almanacs (a term we use loosely to cover any collection of data in a particular field, especially if published on a regular basis). Because these publishers often survive on the quality of the information they provide, it’s in their interest to ensure that the information is of the highest possible quality. Frequently, they are the best available sources.
Quasi-government sources and specialized public and private entities are often also of high reliability. This category includes groups like the Governors Highway Safety Association (for pedestrian safety data) or the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety (for holiday driving survey results), or the New York State Bar Association (for a discussion of legally protected visitation rights at long-term care facilities under pandemic emergency restrictions). For organizations of this type, collecting and publishing a certain type of data is often, literally, a stated part of their reason for existing.
Business associations, industry trade groups, and political organizations usually present reliable information, but because these groups have specific goals this information should always be double-checked in other sources whenever possible.
Individuals and small special-interest groups are usually well-meaning, but their information tends to be less reliable. This is often a simple matter of having fewer resources to develop and present their information, or it might be because a site does not actually produce any original content: it merely aggregates and repackages information from other sources. That aggregation can be helpful in locating other sources, even if it does not offer primary data.
Any online source that is heavily burdened by ads, especially pop-ups, tends to be lower on the reliability chain than a similar source that gives over little or none of its page space to advertising. Conversely, sites that require paid subscriptions (Science News, The New York Times, the Oxford English Dictionary) tend to be of higher quality and sometimes include access to additional resources, such as a paywalled archive or reciprocal search capabilities in other databases.
There are exceptions to every rule, and that’s as true for sources as it is for anything else in life. An otherwise reliable government site might provide incomplete information—or no information at all—on a point which would seem to be within its scope. An industry trade group might release only a limited subset of data, because it’s proprietary to their members and could result in a loss of revenue in the wrong hands. A site maintained by an individual and filled with ads might still provide some of the best available data on a subject, because the person publishing it is a true authority in a very specialized field. The facts used in online content, whenever possible, should be checked against multiple sources. Over time, each writer or collective of content producers will develop their own set of reliable sources based on past performance.
Waltham WordWorks will never let a post leave our office without thorough fact checking. More than our own reputation is on the line: the reputation of our clients is at stake, and we have zero tolerance for letting any client look bad because of a lapse on our part. The content we produce is checked and double-checked, and we typically provide links to all facts, figures, statistics, cases, quotations, and similar information used in our articles. If you’re interested in seeing what kind of work we can do for you, contact us today to arrange for a sample—and fully fact-checked—article for your site.
Future posts in this series will discuss other “mistakes” and “best practices” to address in your site content. Click the “follow” button just below the search box to receive notifications as each is published—we don’t collect or share your information, it’s for this purpose only.
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