One of the things that happens much more frequently with online writing than with print writing is that the writer makes a mistake. This is due primarily to the rapid nature of producing content for the web. There isn’t always the time available to do extensive research when you’ve got multiple deadlines to meet throughout the day. As a result, there may be errors. If you’re a web writer then it’s important to be aware of the possibility of these errors and to handle them with grace.

The biggest error that web writers may make when it comes to this issue is to pretend that they didn’t make the mistake. The mistake is there on the Internet for everyone to see. Even if you delete the post or alter it to reflect the correct information, the error may still be there on the web somewhere with your name attached to it.

This unfortunate situation happened to me not too long ago. I wrote an article about gravel screeners for a client. I had written that a particular gravel screener was capable of doing portable screening. The comments section of the article was rapidly filled with comments from readers correcting me because this particular machine wasn’t actually capable of doing that. The article had already been reprinted on a couple of other sites so I couldn’t just delete the original article to get rid of the mistake.

I decided that the best thing to do would be to cop to the error. I added an “update” to the top of the article correcting the mistake while leaving the original mistake intact for people to see. It’s a bit of a tough thing for my ego to admit my mistakes on the web like that but it seems like a much better move than trying to pretend it didn’t happen.

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