A story that fits gets less scrutiny, which is exactly when it needs more. Six shapes the failure takes — and the tell for each.
What circulates is a compression — true in spirit, absent from the text.
Tell More quotable than anything anyone says out loud.
Do Search the actual book.
Measurements get superseded. The old value circulates for decades with nothing marking it expired.
Tell Repeated everywhere, dated nowhere.
Do Check the source you cited gives your number.
The facts survive the retelling and the emphasis doesn't, so the meaning inverts while every sentence stays defensible.
Tell The paper's own hedge is missing.
Do Read what the authors said they don't know.
Attribution decays toward tidiness. A collective becomes a founder; a documenter becomes a coiner.
Tell One name where a community was.
Do Find the first printed instance, not the famous one.
A layer whose job is to make the finding interesting. Its output isn't a lie — it's a livelier verb.
Tell The vivid verb is doing the work.
Do Open the abstract. See which word the authors chose.
The other five are accidents. This one is an appetite, and it comes looking for you.
Tell You wanted it true before you read it.
Do Slow down here. Don't speed up.
Not “do your own research.” Tracing a claim moves toward the evidence and ends somewhere checkable. That phrase moves away from it and ends where nothing can be checked at all.
Not science literacy as a gate. Nobody owes anybody a reading list before they're allowed to speak about their own life.
Not the pleasure of the debunk. A Myth! headline is exactly as smooth and retellable as the thing it debunks.
Not contempt for the people who repeat the story. We repeated it. In three pieces.
The real thing was rarely the thing that needed improving.
One sheet · print double-sided · pin it up · share freely