Kiefer Likens
Workshop

003 — FIELD NOTE

Two numbers, same page, both confident

Reported

Copy · Evidence · Audit

One thousand-plus projects completed in the statistics band. Three thousand four hundred and fifty-seven a section later.

Neither number is necessarily wrong. They were almost certainly written months apart by different people with different definitions of what counts as a project. That is how this always happens.

The damage is not that a visitor spots the contradiction — most will not. It is that statistics like these get written the way copy gets written, when they should be written the way accounting gets written: once, from one source, with a definition attached.

The related smell is the padded row. When two of five statistics are “100% Tailored service” and “100% Client-focused”, a reader who was going to believe the three real numbers starts discounting all five. A short row of true things beats a full row of impressive-looking ones.