Dr. Ink:
Since you hold copy editors in such high regard, I thought maybe you’d be able to hunt down the answer to this style quandary.
Last week, I was part of a team of reporters that covered a school bus crash. Being the health reporter, I was sent to the hospital to get condition reports. I wrote the story, and then the unavoidable buzz kill of a second-day follow-up story. In it, I wrote that a child’s condition was downgraded from critical to serious. Now, this just seemed logical to me. But our crack police reporter pulled me aside to point out what he thought was an egregious error. If someone gets better, their condition is upgraded, because they’re improving. Now I’m so confused, kind of like when you stare at a word like “obsequious” for too long and start to think it has to be spelled wrong. What do you think, Dr. Ink?
Cynthia Ramnarace
Answer: This note reminds Dr. Ink of the day he tried to figure out if you hand an indictment up or down.
The reporter’s confusion comes, no doubt, from a vertical visualization of the severity of a medical condition. Most of us would see good at the bottom moving upward to fair, serious, and critical. This visual scale moves UP. Yet the word ‘upgrade’ clearly means to improve, while ‘downgrade’ means to get worse. So a patient who moves from serious down the ladder to fair is upgraded. Here’s a mnemonic device: Does this reporter want her salary upgraded or downgraded?
It occurs to Dr. Ink that what journalists need here is not Doc’s verbal explanation, but a graphic. So Inky decided to turn to the best: George Rorick, the man who designed USA Today’s weather page. At Doc’s request, George has created this simple graphic describing how the condition of a hospital patient gets downgraded:
George’s graphic
