Skepticism: The Writer’s Most Important Skill
A case study on a simple, oft-repeated fact that’s just not true
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
—Thomas Paine
If you have some area of knowledge or expertise—perhaps a profession or a particular disease or a sport or a hobby —I bet you’ve seen inaccuracies in articles written by well-meaning writers who do not know the topic as well as you do. The frequency of such mistakes exposes the larger truth: No writer ever has a full understanding of any topic.
Even geniuses don’t know everything about their area of expertise. Newton was wrong about how gravity works on large scales. Einstein corrected him, then he made a few mistakes in his own work. Edison got a bunch of things wrong before that light bulb finally went off.
If they can screw up, so can we.
And this is why, as a writer, you need to have your skeptic’s hat on at all times. If you wish to be a successful writer of factual nonfiction, skepticism is your most important skill. There are many other important skills, of course, from curiosity to good grammar, but none are more foundationally important than skepticism.
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I do not mean the sort of skepticism that implies never trusting or believing anything, nor am I talking about outright negativity or a conspiracy mindset. Proper skepticism just means having a healthy, questioning nature, not accepting things as true just because you heard or read them somewhere—whether in The New York Times, on Fox News, or in a scientific journal. Proper skepticism is methodical. It seeks original sources. It vets credibility. It casts aside opinion and conjecture and zeroes in on truth, if there’s any there.
Whatever you write about, assuming people read it, you have a great responsibility to be accurate. That responsibility ratchets up the more important or sensitive your topic is. Near the top of the list of sensitive topics—and this is an incomplete sampling—are finance and investing, health and wellness, politics, or any divisive cultural issues. A writer’s words can have significant and even dire consequences, and they should be crafted with due respect for the craft and the reader.
And so, you must always…
Be skeptical
You’re well aware, I hope, that misinformation and disinformation are all around. The proliferation of myths and falsehoods, purveyed purposely or through ignorance, had become a national and global crisis, threatening trust in institutions, upheaval of democracy, and cultural norms by which we agree on things that are real or fake. Any responsible writer will want to avoid making matters worse.
Doing your part to serve humanity means keeping a keen eye out for BS, inaccurate facts or statements, and anything else that doesn’t pass the smell test. This includes statistics, quotes from experts, survey results, and conclusions from studies that may or may not be supported by other research. (The latter is a big pet peeve of mine: citing a study to support a premise without checking to see if there is conflicting research out there, or if there are even any supporting studies, or if the one juicy study has zero support).
It means, simply, to check the facts. See if multiple reputable sources agree. Dig down and determine where the fact originated. Was it from credible research, or perhaps the consensus of experts? Or was it just something someone once postulated or mused about?
Case in point
Via a little case study, I’m going to show you just how vital it is to track down the original source of information you present, not the version you’ve seen a million times on dot-com publications or, for that matter, any other sources.
See, sometimes even a respected media site, a well-meaning scientist or doctor, or financial wizard, or the most experty expert in whatever, will repeat something that has no basis in reality. They might do it intentionally, or they might have no clue that the thing they state is bogus.
Here’s a classic example of a “fact” that you can find all over the internet, including on medical dot-org websites and in other quality publications, and which is even repeated in some scientific papers by scientists who study sleep only tangentially:
Adults need 7 to 9 hours of sleep.
There is no scientific basis for that claim. It’s rooted in some grains of truth, but as a stand-alone statement, it’s total bunk.
I know, because in writing my book about sleep, and in reporting on the topic since, I’ve gone down every rabbit hole I come across, trying to find research to support that statement. It does not exist. In the book, I explain that actual sleep experts—scientists who run sleep clinics and who study sleep for a living—tell me that 7 to 8 hours is the norm for most adults, but that some people can get by on less, and that we all tend to sleep less in summer and more in winter, and that if you need 9 hours of sleep daily, it’s likely you have an underlying health condition that is disrupting your sleep, and/or you probably are not getting quality sleep during those many hours you spend in bed.
And that’s not the end of the inaccuracies in how sleep needs are often characterized.
Even the more sound advice that adults need 7 to 8 hours of sleep, which is tossed about frequently without qualification, is misleading: Typical teens are said to need 8 to 10 hours of sleep—probably a pretty reliable estimate. But a teenager doesn’t suddenly stop growing and developing when they turn 18, and therefore may need more than 8 hours nightly for a few more years.
A seemingly benign supposed fact, repeated again and again, with no basis in reality, has been accepted as fact by writers, editors, publishers and even some scientists. I’ve traced the inaccurate claim of 7 to 9 hours back to its likely origins. A few studies may have suggested as much, without offering any definitive cause-and-effect evidence. (And remember: Science never proves anything beyond all doubt. More often, results are suggestive, or indicative. Use your words carefully.) And so it was latched onto and repeated over and over by the sleep industry, and by supposedly objective websites that were, in reality, rather surreptitiously aligned financially with the sleep industry, and so had a vested interest in making us all believe we don’t get enough sleep—so that we’d buy their sleeping pills or their worthless supplements or their fancy mattresses.
From this one case study, it’s clear why we writers must dig into claims to find their origins. It also reveals the critical importance of context and nuance that surrounds many supposed facts. By adding one word, a claim can go from false to factual:
False: Adults need 7 to 8 hours of sleep.
Factual: Most adults need 7 to 8 hours of sleep.
One word, my friends, makes all the difference. And unless you dig a little for the truth, instead of repeating what you first found that sounded like a great fact for your story, you promulgate the inaccuracy.
You can ruin lives
If you’re thinking, “But Rob, I can’t fact check everything, and we’ve got to trust reliable sources, and I do a pretty good job, and my words aren’t going to kill anyone.”
I’d say: It’s not easy. Writing is hard. And you won’t be perfect. But you can try! You can try especially on the key facts, datapoints, and claims that people will base important actions and decisions upon. And you can pay special attention to anything that sounds dubious. And you can look stuff up really easily nowadays, often determining in a few seconds if some “fact” has credible backing or exists in a vacuum (or bounces around in an untrustworthy echo chamber).
Oh, and you might actually kill somebody. If you say X is good for someone, when it’s actually bad, a reader might take your advice and die, or lose their fortune, or meet whatever ill fate you’ve set them up for.
Whatever topics you write about, and whatever your writing style, experience and expertise, don’t be that sloppy blogger or search-hungry content creator who cites whatever other media are writing about because it sounds good to you. Be a responsible writer, and strive for a high bar of accuracy and appropriate context. It takes time. It takes effort. But it’s how you become a trusted, credible writer.
A great writer never assumes any given claim is factual, just because it’s out there.
Cheers,
Rob
So true! We see this so vividly now, given the state of politics and how some candidates (and so-called news sources) use words to reinforce false assumptions.