RE: $500 million for an error in a policy manual

[Dan Goldstein <DGoldstein -at- nuot -dot- com>]

Thus the importance of technical editing. A spell checker would allow either version of the sentence. A technical editor would do a version comparison between the old and new manuals and flag the changes for SME review.

But as has already been pointed out, the technical editor would only be saving them from their poor specs and procedures, which are a deeper root cause of this half-a-bil-boom.  


-----Original Message-----
From: Lauren
Sent: Friday, December 12, 2014 4:44 AM
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Re: $500 million for an error in a policy manual

They won't give a straight answer about how it happened but they wrote "ENSURE an organic absorbent (kitty litter) is added to the waste" when packaging drums of nitrate salt. I think this is a possible spell checker error. Someone may have mistyped, misspelled, or worse yet, misheard, "ENSURE inorganic absorbent..." and what got added to the new and spontaneous revision with no revision control were the directions for making a patented explosive.


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