The Law of Unintended Consequences
Have you ever tried reorganising your phone home screen, then were unable to find any apps the next time you switched it on? Or maybe a favourite food became inedible for you because an ingredient you were fine with was replaced by one that you’re allergic to?
These situations, both mundane and strange, form a pattern that became clear to me when I heard of someone reading a copy of ‘War and Peace’ and they noticed a bizarre word in the text: ‘nookd’. You might think it a random typo, but it kept turning up. Candles were nookd to light up dark rooms. And over time the reader realised what had happened. The person was reading on a nook e-reader, and an update had been issued on the file. Every instance of ‘kindle’ had been replaced with ‘nook’, presumably to separate the two brands’ ebooks. But the knock-on effect was also changing every normal instance of the verb ‘kindle’.
And these sort of things are what I want to talk about today, what I call The Law of Unintended Consequences. When someone makes a well-intentioned change, but without thinking it through all the way, so it negatively effects themselves or someone else later on.
I actually managed to avoid a situation like this early in my career. I noticed in a document talking about paywalls that sometimes it said ‘paywall’ and sometimes just ‘wall’. This was inconsistent, so I left instruction to change instances of ‘wall’ to ‘paywall’, but also to be careful not to change any ‘paywall’ occurrences to ‘paypaywall’.
But that’s one person making changes. What about when multiple people are amending a document? Then things get tricky. Two people reading the same document can have the same idea for an edit, but at different times. So to the end reader, the document segues to a topic, segues away then later segues back to it. And that’s the easy-to-spot variety. Quite a lot I see acronyms introduced twice, or not at all. Which is a problem because not everyone knows what ‘TLA’ means.
I suppose the question now is, how do you avoid this? It gets easier as your length of document gets shorter. A tweet can be looked at in its entirety with a glance, after all. But when you’re looking at something that’s going to be several thousand words long? Well, you need to plan your writing ahead of time. Start with a bullet list of things you want to talk about, decide on an order, sketch out how to move from topic to topic, and when no one thinks that there’s anything else that needs to go in, only then do you start putting sentences on the page. If this sounds like too much work to you, you can always just write the piece first then send the document to a proofreader like me to sort it out before publishing. But you should expect lots of notes like ‘this doesn’t make sense, please rewrite’ and ‘this thing is never explained, is the reader supposed to know what it is?’.
Have you ever spotted an unintended consequence in something you’ve read? Perhaps a character went into their secret hiding kindle? Let me know in the comments.
