"Oops" is a word. Learn to use it wisely.

If you make a mistake -- and you will -- fix it.

If someone else catches your mistake, thank them, admit it, and fix it.

If someone else catches your mistake and you don't think it's a mistake, double check your facts before you defend yourself.

If someone else catches your mistake and you don't think it's a mistake and you don't double check your facts before you defend yourself, be prepared to end up making a complete ass of yourself.

If someone else catches your mistake and you don't think it's a mistake and you don't double check your facts before you defend yourself and you end up making a complete ass of yourself, do not call the person who caught your mistake mean or jealous.  You made a mistake all by yourself.  It's not their fault.



An author was caught in an error here:

And I posted my comment about it here:

A month after I posted that, the author responded:

Down there at the bottom of the screen shot.  Can you see it?  She asks, "Exactly what is misspelled in your quote?"

When another reader, not the reviewer, points out that the word "chieftan" should be spelled "chieftain," rather than admit the mistake, the author goes on the defensive.  The aggressive defensive.

What the author either forgot about or didn't know or was too wrapped up in her embarrassment to pay any attention to was that the commenter might be feeding her comments to her GoodReads friends.  Truth is, I'm not experienced enough with GR to even have thought of that myself right away, and since I don't have many friends or followers anyway, my review and my comments don't spread directly to many other people.

The same can't be said of the people who responded.  They have many, many, many friends and followers.  And they warned the author not to argue.  *I* warned her. 

But she said she wasn't afraid of me, that she had not made a mistake at all, and I was just a jealous, failed author who should have helped her (but it sounds like she doesn't need any help because she hasn't made a mistake and has legions of fans).

So she proceeded to criticize her critic and insist she didn't mind "legitimate" comments. 

But some of those people who had been receiving the feeds from this discussion began putting in their own comments, and asking the author to provide sources for her contentions.  What she first provided were just statements without supporting facts.

In fact, she kept posting more and more and more evidence, and lashed out more and more at her critic.

Of course, the "critique" of her work was so inflammatory that no one responded to it for a month. . . . until she did.

And when her claims didn't satisfy the other people who had joined the conversation -- especially when her final authority seemed to be her own superior knowledge and education -- they began to provide counter evidence.

Of course, that wasn't good enough for her.

Again, the author was warned that she might be doing herself more harm than good.

At this stage of the conversation, other people had joined and begun doing a little more research, research that I had already done and that the author could have -- and should have -- done.  Well, she would  have if she'd admitted from the start that her spelling was an error and that what appeared in other instances to be agreements with her were in fact just other errors.

But the other readers were also warning her yet again that she might be doing herself more harm than good.

And they were noticing, too, that the author was contradicting herself.

It reached the point that even the person who had sort of been defending her -- or at least not defending me! -- came back into the discussion with another warning to the author.

Most of the evidence the author cited to back up her contention was easily proven to be wrong, and she kind of ended up being a classic example of the Streisand effect.  (Hey, that's okay.  I didn't know what it was either, so I looked it up!)

If the author had simply gone to the review and admitted she made a mistake and then took steps to fix it, I probably would have removed the comment entirely.  No one else would ever have known about it.

Oops.