Dear Editor:

Congratulations to the faculty and staff of The Experience for offering the LMC newspa- per in an electronic format. I have in the past looked forward to reading the newspaper each Friday and am pleased I can continue to do so more often and without having to search for a hard copy.

Having said that, I have long been bothered by the frequent not occasional or rare — typo- graphical, grammatical, and content errors that have plagued the newspaper. I wanted to excuse the errors because it is a student newspaper. I wanted to overlook them because you are in the process of learning. I wanted to ignore them to avoid being judgmental and critical.

Now that The Experience has an even greater audience by being online, I now just want to challenge the staff to get it right and pursue excellence! John Wooden, Hall of Fame basketball player and coach said, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”

I could not continue reading the paper after observing multiple errors in the first two arti- cles. Misspelled words, lack of capitalization, inaccurate references, and grammatical errors should never be acceptable.

I realize as humans we make errors, but errors cannot and should not be the norm. Excellence and perfection should be the goal. As a result, as an employee and reader, I could no longer keep silent and felt it was my duty and responsibility to call this matter to your attention.

We are not only an institution of learning,

but higher learning. The LMC Experience represents not just the writers, editors and journalism classes and faculty but it also rep- resents me, and everyone who attends and/ or works at LMC.

To that end, after discussing some of the errors with the Experience’s Editor In Chief Peter Costanza he suggested I share my thoughts in this editorial. Please understand my comments are intended to encourage. I only want the very best for the journalism students in particular and all students in general.

I close with a Chinese proverb, “who aims at excellence will be above mediocrity; who aims at mediocrity will fall short of it.”

And the words of Aristotle who said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.”