Too little
Careless enlargement
“Town enjoys record harvest.”
A narrow result becomes a claim about people and crops that were never counted.
Exactitude
Verify the scope of a claim before repeating a vivid summary of it.
Dispositional fidelity to the particulars and limits of what one observes or represents.
Exactitude makes an account faithful to the particulars that determine its meaning: who, how many, when, under what conditions, and with what limits. Reporting requires selection, so the task is to preserve the details that would change a reasonable reader’s understanding. A short sentence can be exact; a paragraph of impressive figures can still mislead.
Exactitude gives readers a claim they can actually understand
Three tomatoes win a prize at the community garden show. By the time the result reaches your headline, every garden in town appears to have enjoyed a record harvest. The winning crate has somehow become an agricultural census. You return to the result card and write what was counted: three entries, in one class, at one show. The smaller claim gives readers more information.
Finding the balance in Exactitude
You must write a short headline about three prize-winning entries in a garden show.
A fitting response
Faithful scope
“Three local entries win the tomato class.”
The headline tells readers what happened and leaves the unmeasured harvest alone.
Pursued too far
Exhaustive obstruction
“We cannot report until every tomato is weighed.”
A demand for irrelevant completeness delays a modest claim already supported by the record.
Ask which omitted detail would change the claim. If the result card later proves to list three categories rather than three entries, change the sentence; exactitude serves the particulars, not your first careful wording.
What Exactitude makes possible
Readers can compare the account with its basis. A bounded result may be useful to a gardener, a participant, or someone checking the prize list precisely because its scale is clear. You also leave room for later reporting without having to defend a claim you never established.
Exactitude in ordinary life
The forwarded statistic
Keep the time period and the group being counted with a percentage you share. A number without its denominator can tell a different story.
The meeting summary
Distinguish “three people objected” from “the group rejected it.” The first describes testimony; the second claims a decision.
Nearby virtues, different work
Attentiveness
Attentiveness notices the limiting phrase; Exactitude carries that limit accurately into the account.
Intellectual Honesty
Intellectual Honesty lets evidence change a belief. Exactitude governs how faithfully the resulting claim is represented.
Exactitude and its counterfeits
Decorative precision
Decimal places counterfeit Exactitude when they leave the sample or date unstated. Genuine exactitude includes the detail that controls what the number means.
Pedantry
Pedantry is a counterfeit of Exactitude when it corrects a harmless expression while leaving the inflated headline untouched. The faithful response starts with the consequential error.
How to cultivate Exactitude
Underline the subject and scope of one important claim before shortening it.
Compare your summary with the record and ask what a reader might reasonably infer beyond it.
Give an estimate its warranted precision and make a material uncertainty visible.
Try it today
Take one ordinary public notice or summary you are about to share. Check its date, subject, and scope against the original. Keep the smallest qualification that prevents a materially different claim.
Questions worth returning to
- Which detail controls the meaning of my summary?
- Did shortening this sentence enlarge what it claims?
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
You have dealt with the facts with cool, painstaking fidelity and left those naked and uncontradicted facts to speak for themselves.
Douglass praises Wells’s painstaking handling of facts in her anti-lynching investigation. The praise concerns what the reporting establishes, giving a sharper standard than an impressive or vivid summary.
The traveller must not generalize on the spot, however true may be his apprehension—however firm his grasp, of one or more facts.
Harriet Martineau · How to Observe: Morals and Manners · Part I, Introduction
Martineau follows this warning with absurd generalizations from isolated encounters. A reporter can accurately know a few facts while still inflating their scope in a headline.
So that here a belief—if indeed a statement with no definite idea attached to it can be called a belief—had spread over almost the whole of England without any vestige of evidence.
Charles Darwin · The Autobiography of Charles Darwin · Written May 1st, 1881; field-bean anecdote
The preceding inquiry traces a widely repeated newspaper claim to speakers who cannot explain it. Several repetitions do not turn one untested assertion into several observations.
Such men forget that the cotton crop has doubled, and more than doubled, since the era of slavery, and that, even granting their contention, the Negro is still supreme in a Cotton Kingdom larger than that on which the Confederacy builded its hopes.
W. E. B. Du Bois · The Souls of Black Folk · Chapter VII, Of the Black Belt
Du Bois distinguishes a share of production from the growing total. The historical wording is retained; the statistical lesson is to identify the denominator before giving a number its headline.
But in our dealings with objective nature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of the truth; and decisions for the mere sake of deciding promptly and getting on to the next business would be wholly out of place.
In an essay defending some acts of faith, James specifically distinguishes questions settled by observation. Urgency cannot enlarge the tomato sample or establish what was never counted.
Besides this, the system of assessing property in the country districts of Georgia is somewhat antiquated and of uncertain statistical value; there are no assessors, and each man makes a sworn return to a tax-receiver. Thus public opinion plays a large part, and the returns vary strangely from year to year.
W. E. B. Du Bois · The Souls of Black Folk · Chapter VIII, Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece
Du Bois qualifies the tax figures he has just presented by explaining how they were produced. Exactitude includes the measurement process, not only faithful copying of the number.
The organs of arm-chair respectability ought not to make loose charges against radicals, they ought not condemn without knowledge.
Upton Sinclair · The Brass Check · Part I, chapter V, The Condemned Meat Industry
Sinclair has asked a reviewer to specify the investigation behind a charge that his book is inaccurate. The demand for a stated evidential basis is useful even when the critic and author are opponents; this quotation does not independently validate every claim in his book.
Continue through the catalog
Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.