INSIDE THIS ISSUE: Nobody's Perfect | Live with Writing Mistakes | Avoid Blundering into Bias

Fear of failing at school, work, or relationships holds many people back. As Carlin Flora explains in the Psychology Today article "Embracing the Fear of Failure,"   "Even if environmental conditions allow for high failure tolerance, some people will take setbacks to heart instead of to mind. Such people let a disappointment seep into their sense of self like a poison."

But failure is "not as bad as you may think," says Marcia A. Reed in the Black Enterprise piece "The Truth about Failure." In fact, Reed quotes job counselor Seaborn Morgan who says, "If you're not failing on a regular basis, then you're probably not doing a whole lot."

Recognizing "that there's more to be learned by focusing on what went wrong than what went right," Morgan explains, "successful individuals learn to use failure to their advantage--they acknowledge it, analyze it and overcome it."

Reed summarizes Morgan's tips for managing and surmounting failure:

First, "Find your purpose and define your goal... in specific, measurable outcomes. Use them as the criteria for assessing progress, as well as success and failure. For example, if you aim to improve your health, use changes in cholesterol, blood pressure or weight to track how far you've come toward achieving your goal."

Second, "Know your weaknesses... Conduct a self-assessment and look for areas in which you feel most prone to fail. Then, create an action plan to strengthen yourself and respond positively when you do fail."

Third, "Think of failures as learning... Don't make excuses for failure; acknowledge and accept it as soon as it occurs." Analyze it and ask yourself: "What was the mistake? Why did it happen? How could it have been avoided? How can I do better next time?"

Fourth, "Rebound and take more risks... Build your tolerance for failure and resilience by forcing yourself to take more risks as soon as possible."

Writing expert Peter Elbow uses an interesting approach to the physical process of putting words on paper that may work for you, too. In his book Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process 2nd ed., (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 28, he says, "Gradually I have learned not to stop and cross out something I've just written when I change my mind. I just leave it there and write my new word or phrase on a new line."

Elbow goes on to explain.

What is involved here is developing an increased tolerance for letting mistakes show. If you find yourself crumpling up your sheet of paper and throwing it away and starting with a new one every time you change your mind, you are really saying, I must destroy all evidence of mistakes." Not quite so extreme is the person who scribbles over every mistake so avidly that not even the tail of the "y" is visible. Stopping to cross out mistakes doesn't just waste psychic energy, it distracts you from full concentration on what you are trying to say.

What's more, I've found that leaving mistakes uncrossed out somehow makes it easier for me to revise. When I cross out all my mistakes, I end up with a draft. And a draft is hard to revise because it is a complete whole. But when I leave my first choices there littering my page along with some second and third choices, I don't have a draft, I just have a succession of ingredients. Often it is easier to whip that succession of ingredients into something usable than, as it were, to undo that completed draft and turn it into a better draft. It turns out I can just trundle through that pile of ingredients, slash out some words and sections, rearrange some bits, and end up with something quite usable. And quite often I discover in retrospect that my original "mistaken phrase" is really better than what I replaced it with: more lively or closer to what I end up saying.

Elbow has many valuable tips and insights. Find them in Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the writing Process.

"Objective reporters maintain an emotional distance from their work and balance their writing in a way that does not suggest they have been swayed by personal feelings toward either a subject or source, using verification and attribution," says Barbara G. Friedman. She adds, "Authors of Web content feel no such compulsion to remain objective."

Cautioning researchers about the "lack of accountability" online Friedman – who is the author of Web Search Savvy: Strategies and Shortcuts for Online Research (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 156 and 164-5 – emphasizes that "There's nothing wrong about espousing an opinion online; evidence of bias is not intended to make you doubt a site, but rather to understand its purpose."

"If you're using the Internet for research, you'll want to determine whether an author is motivated by a personal or professional agenda so that you can place the information into a wider context.," she explains and suggests asking three questions to evaluate a site's agenda:

Visit Web Search Savvy: Strategies and Shortcuts for Online Research to find more great online research guidelines.