Dear Mr. Nichols:
I have forwarded letters to be printed in the Nation on a couple of occasions. Consistently, my letters have been printed with grammatical errors even though I ensure that they are correctly written prior to sending them out. The letter I sent in response to Daniel David’s editorial was no exception. I was disappointed to see my letter once again containing an error which was not in the original I sent to you as the Editor.
Before I send out letters, I always ensure that they are written correctly with the proper grammar and punctuation. In the March 23rd issue of the Nation, I was disappointed to see that my letter contained an error hereby it appears I am calling the “50-50 Language Model” as “SO-SO Language Model”. By printing “SO-SO Language Model”, it indicates to the readership that the Cree School Board does not consider this issue as serious. More importantly, this error undermines the attempt of the Cree School Board to clarify the confusion of the Language issue and its efforts to ensure that the Cree language retains a predominant role in all Cree community school.
I am left to question as to what possible reasons there could be for consistently making these errors to my letters. As Chief Editor, do you not proof-read the articles, letters and other material you print in the Nation before they go to the publisher to ensure there are no errors in them?
I would like to request that you reprint my letter, but this time, please ensure that you make the correction so that the letter will read “50-50” language model rather than “SO-SO” language model. I believe that you owe me a public apology for this error to my letter.
Note: The Nation takes the responsibility of letting our readers and community stakeholders express their views and/or concerns in our news magazine very seriously. So much so, that publishing two-page letters costs us thousands of dollars, so it is never our intention to misrepresent or modify documents, letters, etc… A simple conversion from PDF to Word (the format required to publish) caused the said ‘typo’. It was an honest error and while we proof read and check material that goes into the Nation, letters do not undergo the same stringent criteria our journalists are subject to. We will be informing Word and Acrobat Reader of the problems associated with converting from a PDF to a Word format.
