Exactitude

Exactitude gives an agreement people can carry into work

A customer orders twelve cushion covers, including fabric and removable fastenings. Your workshop note becomes “twelve cushions.” Beside the sewing machine, the stuffing bag looks delighted to have been invited. You return to the agreed wording and clarify the note before anyone cuts material. One noun was about to give the job a new interior.

An illustrative scene.

Exactitude: finding the balance

A convenient workshop summary changes the scope of an agreed order.

A later change can be agreed explicitly. Exactitude preserves what was agreed and marks the change; it does not prevent revision.

What Exactitude makes possible

Accurate handovers let people cooperate without constantly reconstructing the original conversation. The benefit is practical: the right material, a recognizable result and fewer disputes caused by differing assumptions. A faithful record can also state that a detail remains undecided.

Exactitude in ordinary life

A quotation

Keep the unit attached to a price and the scope attached to a total.

A handover message

Distinguish what has been completed from what someone has merely proposed.

Nearby virtues, different work

Honesty

Honesty resists deception; Exactitude also corrects innocent imprecision.

Diligence

Diligence gives the work care. Exactitude preserves the details by which the work is identified.

Exactitude and its counterfeits

Impressive precision

Extra decimal places counterfeit Exactitude when the underlying estimate is uncertain. A faithful account preserves the uncertainty.

How to cultivate Exactitude

1. Identify which particulars would change the result.

2. Check a summary against the original agreement.

3. Mark changes and unresolved points instead of silently filling gaps.

Try it today

Read a low-stakes instruction you are about to pass on. Check its quantity, unit or scope against the original, and clarify one meaningful ambiguity.

Questions worth returning to

• Which small word would change the job?
• Have I converted an estimate or proposal into a settled fact?

Keep the practice proportionate

Quotations and further reading

Seven readings, one for each day. All remain available here. Historical arguments and fictional dialogue are identified in their source notes.

1. With virtue, capacity, and good conduct in other respects, the person who is habitually inaccurate cannot be trusted; his work has to be gone over again; and he thus causes an infinity of annoyance, vexation, and trouble.

   Samuel Smiles · Self-Help
   CHAPTER IX. Men of Business.; paragraph beginning “Too little attention, however, is paid to this highly important quality of accuracy. As a…”
   Samuel Smiles · Popular Edition, John Murray, London, 1897; Project Gutenberg #935.

   The concrete cost of inaccuracy is other people having to repeat the work. That illuminates how changing covers to cushions creates a preventable production task. Smiles’s categorical judgment is broader than the page’s treatment of one correctable mistake.

2. I began by hiring a small boy who had previously received a little knowledge of store-keeping, and through him I succeeded in learning how to weigh.

   Victor H. Tulane · The Negro in Business
   Printed pp. 256–257, Victor H. Tulane’s account; PDF page indices 282–283
   Victor H. Tulane, quoted in Booker T. Washington’s The Negro in Business · Hertel, Jenkins & Co., 1907; Internet Archive scan negroinbusiness00washgoog.

   Tulane learns the specific measurement skill his business needs from someone with practical knowledge. Accurate work depends on acquiring the right method, just as the covers order depends on a correct specification. Attribute the words to Tulane, not Washington.

3. Treasure and instrument and time and deed and place of act: These five, till every doubt remove, think o'er with care exact.

   Tiruvalluvar · Tirukkural
   Couplet 675, The Method of Acting, printed p. 94
   Tiruvalluvar · G. U. Pope, The Sacred Kurral of Tiruvalluva-Nayanar, W. H. Allen & Co., London, 1886.
   Translated by G. U. Pope (verse translation; prose commentary excluded)

   The couplet names the particulars that make action possible. Exactitude in the covers order means preserving the material, task and timing needed by the next worker. “Every doubt” is the translation’s rhetoric; the page requires proportionate clarity.

4. Above all things, order, and distribution, and singling out of parts, is the life of dispatch; so as the distribution be not too subtle: for he that doth not divide, will never enter well into business; and he that divideth too much, will never come out of it clearly.

   Francis Bacon · Essays
   THE ESSAYS OR COUNSELS, CIVIL AND MORAL, / Of Dispatch; paragraph beginning “Above all things, order, and distribution, and singling out of parts, is the life of dispa…”
   Francis Bacon · Project Gutenberg #575 transcription; underlying print edition not specified in the preserved capture.

   Bacon pairs useful division of a task with a warning against excessive subdivision. That is the page’s distinction between preserving covers-only scope and burying the task in purposeless detail.

5. Not only does all soundness of reasoning depend on the work thus done in the outset, but we may sometimes gain more by insistence on the expression of a truth, than by much wordless thinking about it; for to strive to express it clearly is often to detect it thoroughly; and education, even as regards thought, nearly sums itself in making men economise their words, and understand them.

   John Ruskin · Unto This Last and Other Essays on Political Economy
   ESSAYS ON POLITICAL ECONOMY: / III. / FOOTNOTES:; paragraph beginning “[100] The reader must not think that any care can be misspent in tracing the connexion and…”
   John Ruskin · Ward, Lock & Co., London, Melbourne and Toronto, 1912; Project Gutenberg #36541.

   In a note on the terms used in his economic argument, Ruskin connects clear expression with discovering what one means. Keeping “covers” distinct from “cushions” performs that work at the handoff. The later religious example is outside this selection; the passage concerns precision in words, not an instruction to add more of them.

6. The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

   Robert Louis Stevenson · Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers
   VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE AND OTHER PAPERS / “VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE” / IV.—TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE; paragraph beginning “L’art de bien dire is but a drawing-room accomplishment unless it be pressed into the serv…”
   Robert Louis Stevenson · Chatto & Windus, 1897; Project Gutenberg #386 transcriber identifies this edition.

   The surrounding essay explicitly extends this problem to letters and ordinary business. The scope note must guide the next worker to the intended task, not merely sound plausible.

7. I now open’d a little stationer’s shop. I had in it blanks of all sorts, the correctest that ever appear’d among us, being assisted in that by my friend Breintnal.

   Benjamin Franklin · Autobiography
   Autobiography — First narrative portion: opening the stationer’s shop and printed blanks; paragraph beginning “I now open’d a little stationer’s shop”; paragraph beginning “I now open’d a little stationer’s shop. I had in it blanks of all sorts, the correctest th…”
   Benjamin Franklin · Harvard Classics, edited by Charles W. Eliot; P. F. Collier & Son, New York, 1909; Project Gutenberg #148.

   Franklin attributes the correctness of printed forms to collaborative help. The covers order likewise benefits from someone checking the actual wording at the handoff; exactitude need not mean solitary perfection. “Blanks” are forms to be filled in, and Franklin’s superlative is his own retrospective claim.

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