Comments on: Getting the name right

By: Michelle Rafter

Michelle Rafter — Sat, 17 May 2008 01:15:04 +0000

I used to be a newspaper reporter and can attest to the fact that it didn’t matter what a story was about, how how badly the subject looked in it, the only thing they called to complain about was if their name was spelled wrong.

Now if I’m doing a phone interview that was set up by a P.R. person, I’ll cut and paste the name of the person I’m interviewing from the P.R. person’s email, then ask the subject if it’s spelled correctly. I also invite them to join my LinkedIn connections so needed, I can refer to their L.I. profile page for correct spelling, job title and and other details.

Michelle Rafter

By: kerry dexter

kerry dexter — Thu, 15 May 2008 14:58:28 +0000

I’ve done this only once, knock wood. Neither I nor the editors caught it. It was a major music business person who rarely gives interviews, but who had agreed to speak about an artist he was working with, who was the main subject of the story. Told the editor about the mistake after the story was in print, but neither of us pursued it further. several years later, I was invited to sit in on recording sessions by a different artist and Mr. X turned out to be the engineer. I sat quietly in the corner until the artist introduced us [Mr.X and had only spoken on the phone before], and later that day he came over to me and said “Now I know why I remember you, we talked about artist Y. That was the best interview! I usually end up sounding like an idiot in print. You made me sound like I knew what I was talking about.” No mention of the misspelled name…

By: Meryl K. Evans

Meryl K. Evans — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:19:54 +0000

Unfortunately, yes. Talk about embarrassing because I know exactly what it’s like to have your name mashed, pounced, and even genderfied. I knew how to spell an expert’s name — and I had it spelled right in most of the article… but she called me on one of my typos.

And this was for the only client where things didn’t work out… that’s not the end of that. It was my last article for this resource. Imagine, e-mailing the editor to point out the misspelling.

I apologized to the expert and told her it was fixed. Nothing you can do to make it better. Just fix it.

By: wordwych

wordwych — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:18:50 +0000

After a thorough and deserved thumping from my editor for misspelling an interviewee’s name years ago, I briefly considered having “GOT NAME?” tattooed across the backs of my hands. Then I realized that was just a leeetle drastic, and I trained myself to ask everyone how to spell their name. EVERYONE, whether their name is George, Mary, Al or Fred. I’ve actually met a guy named Edd who spells it with two Ds. I’m sure there’s somebody out there who spells it with a hyphen! I get some odd “Huh?” looks from people who have ‘mundane’ names (Mary Smith, John Lee, etc.) but I just explain to them that it’s my job to make sure I have everything correct, and that, believe it or not, there are several different ways to spell even the most common names. (My favorite thing to say is, “If I didn’t ask, it would be just my luck that you’d spell your name with a I or two Es, and I would feel terrible if I spelled it incorrectly.”)

I have also got into the habit of noting to my editors that I have confirmed an unusually-spelled name, as I once had an editor change “Marye” to “Mary” on the assumption that I’d made a typo, and Marye was justifiably miffed that her name was misspelled in the piece.

Another thing I’ve learned is to get people to confirm their business titles for me. There have been a few occasions when my editors have provided me with contact instructions (‘Call company VP Bill Smith’) and it turned out that the person I talked to had an entirely different title.

By: Shauna

Shauna — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:05:38 +0000

When I was going on a tour in Cancun, I completely missed it when the tour guide called “my” last name in the lobby of a hotel where a large group of other tourists waited for tour pick-ups. After calling the tour company to find out why no one showed up for me and paying for a taxi myself to meet the bus in another location, I discovered what had happened. During the roll call, he said a name whose only similarity to mine was the first letter, S. When no one answered, I said, “Do you mean My Name?” and he laughed and said, “Oh. I couldn’t read my writing.”