Check an SI Draft Before You Trust It: A Worked Example

An SI draft can look finished. Clean sentences, a confident tone, no typos. That's exactly why it needs checking. A wrong fact in a polished draft looks just like a right one.

Most advice on this says "always double-check." True, but not much help. Check what, and how?

So here's a worked example. Below is a short draft of the kind an SI helper might write. I made it up for this post, every detail of it, so nothing in it points to a real book, place, or person. Then I'll go through it step by step, the way I'd check a real one.

The draft

Say you asked for a short note to a book club about next month's meeting, and got this back:

Hi everyone! Our next meeting is Thursday, March 12, at 7 PM at the Elm Street library. We'll be discussing our next book, which won a major prize the year it came out. Here's a link to the author's website. As the author said in one interview, "Every story is a map someone else has to walk." See you there!

It reads fine. That's the problem.

Step 1: Mark every checkable claim

Before checking anything, go through and mark each piece that could be wrong. Not the tone. The facts.

This draft has seven:

1. The day: Thursday.
2. The date: March 12.
3. The time: 7 PM.
4. The place: the Elm Street library.
5. The prize.
6. The link.
7. The quote.

That's a lot for six short sentences. It usually is. Marking them first keeps you from skimming past one because the sentence around it sounded right.

Step 2: Check your own details against your own source

The date, time, and place didn't come from the world. They came from you, or from whoever set up the meeting. So check them against that: the calendar invite, the earlier email, the room booking.

This sounds obvious, and it's easy to skip. If you never told the helper "Elm Street," ask where it came from. A detail you didn't supply is a detail it may have filled in because it sounded likely.

Step 3: Check that the day and the date agree

"Thursday, March 12" is two claims, and they have to agree. Look at a calendar for that year. If March 12 isn't a Thursday, one of them is wrong, and the draft can't tell you which.

This is one of the most useful quick checks there is, because it needs no outside source at all. Any time a draft gives both a weekday and a date, make sure they match.

Step 4: Track down every claim about the world

"Won a major prize" is vague, and vague is a warning sign. Which prize? What year? If the draft can't say, it may be filling a gap with something that sounds right.

Find the claim in a place you trust, like the prize's own list of winners or the publisher's page for the book. If you can't find it there, cut it. A note to a book club doesn't need it, and a wrong claim like that is the kind of thing someone at the table will notice.

Step 5: Open every link

Don't check that a link looks right. Open it.

Three things can go wrong. The link can be dead. It can work but go to the wrong place, like a different author with a similar name. Or it can go to the right place, but that page doesn't say what the draft says it does.

A link that looks real isn't the same as a link that works. Open each one, and make sure the page says what the sentence around it claims.

Step 6: Treat every quote as unconfirmed until you find it

The quote is the riskiest line in this draft. "Every story is a map someone else has to walk" sounds like something an author might say. That's exactly the trouble. A model can produce a line that sounds like a real quote, put a real person's name on it, and give no sign that it's invented.

So find the quote in the original source, with the exact wording. Not a page that repeats it. The interview itself. If you can't find it, the quote doesn't go out. No paraphrase, and no "something like."

Step 7: Fix it, then read it once more

Once each claim is checked, fix what's wrong, cut what you couldn't confirm, and read the whole thing again from the top. Fixes can bring in new mistakes, like changing the date but not the day.

Here's the draft after the check. The meeting details are in brackets, since this one is made up. The prize and the quote are gone, because in this example they couldn't be confirmed:

Hi everyone! Our next meeting is [checked day and date] at [checked time] at [checked place]. We'll be discussing our next book. Here's the author's website: [opened and checked link]. See you there!

Shorter and plainer. Also true.

Make the next check smaller

For a note this short, this takes a few minutes. A longer piece takes longer, but the steps are the same.

The best way to keep it manageable is to give the helper less to make up. Hand it the facts up front: the date, the time, the place, the link. Tell it not to add quotes, awards, or numbers unless you supplied them. A draft built only from what you gave it has far fewer places to go wrong.

Why the check has to come from outside

An SI helper isn't lying when it gets something wrong. It's producing text that sounds right, without anything inside it checking that it is right. My glossary calls that a hallucination: https://johndclay.com/blog/si-words-plain-english

The confident tone is the same either way. So the check can't be "does this sound right?" It has to be "where did this come from, and did I see it there myself?"

It's a habit I try to keep here, too: when a post mentions the book, the facts get checked against the live book page first. The longer SI pieces go out on X as Articles, and they're listed with a short summary here: https://johndclay.com/articles

And if you came for the fiction, Book One of The Shadows Series starts here: https://johndclay.com/books/shadows-of-the-forgotten